A man walks out of a cornfield leading a young boy by the hand and cradling a baby. He walks out onto a road in the shadow of an airliner's tail section. The remains of the plane are smeared across the fields behind.

The opening moments of Peter Weir's new film are remarkable in their depth of detail and forbidding horror. Weir himself emerged as part of the New Wave of Australian cinema, eventually leaving (like Bruce Beresford, Gillian Armstrong and Philip Noyce) for the bright lights of Hollywood. The films from there are all slick, well-behaved and not a little dull - The Year of Living Dangerously, the wildly overvalued Witness, and the hugely successful (and quite dreadful) Dead Poets Society. All that and the vacuous Green Card seemed to have put a seal on the Australian's career. Refreshing then to see Fearless as something of a return to 70s form.

Max Klein (Jeff Bridges) has died and lived to tell the tale, walking away from the horrific crash that claimed his partner's life. But now Max Klein is convinced that he is immortal - walking across eight-lane highways, standing on the ledges of tall buildings, eating the strawberries to which he is allergic - rejecting the ministrations of the circling grief councillors and lawyers that descend like vultures. "I came out of that crash with the taste and touch and feel of life," he tells his wife, Isabella Rossellini.

Eventually he meets another survivor, Carla (Rosie Perez) who lost her baby son in the accident and is now almost catatonic with grief. Together the pair learn to prevail in a world of people who, as Klein says, do not know what it is to die.

There is a lot in Fearless about the American way of death that brings to mind Michael Tolkin's recent novel Among The Dead, albeit with a less satirical edge. Indeed, the core of Weir's film is less to do with humour and more to do with almost a celebration of morbidity rather than the affirmation of life one might have expected - which would at least help to explain its disastrous showing at the US box office.

The director uses techniques in here that he's left more or less alone since his masterpiece, 1977's The Last Wave: subtle slow motion, distorted soundtrack, an almost obsessive eye for the close-up. As in that film, and the earlier Picnic at Hanging Rock, the effect (beautifully realised by cinematographer Alan Daviau) is to simultaneously distance reality and draw the viewer into the imaginings of these extraordinary people; a subjective process, very much at odds with most Hollywood film-making, looking at the country with foreign eyes. Fearless is largely un-American.

The rumpled Bridges is as good here as he was in Gilliam's The Fisher King, while for her part Perez was recently Oscar nominated. In support, Rossellini is given far more to do than the glamour-puss roles she's usually blessed with, even if the ever excellent John Turturro as an airline trauma therapist is underused.

Unfortunately for the film though, Rafael Yglesias' screenplay (from his own novel) is less sure of itself in the last twenty or so minutes. Despite Klein's assertion early on that he'd given up on God, there is an inevitable drag towards religious tokens. (Do the dying always need to walk towards a bright light? Do we really need all that Christ symbolism?) Coupled with the equally inevitable meeting between the two women in Klein's life, and a final, all-too-American gesture at the climax that cannot be sufficiently counteracted, even by the extraordinary hallucinatory vision of the crash itself (unseen until then).

Fearless is a brave attempt to subvert the mainstream, to inject arthouse metaphysical muscle into big budget cinema. Ultimately it doesn't have the courage of its convictions enough to carry through to the bitter end, but in even trying it achieves some striking images and audacious ideas for a big studio picture, and, for anyone worried that Peter Weir had lost it forever over the ill-judged amateur theatrics of Dead Poets Society, at least renews some faith in one of Australia's most visual and idiosyncratic talents.