December 23, 2014 -- This surrealistic dark comedy about mental illness and sexual deviants, set in Scotland around the Christmas holiday season tries to walk a tightrope with drama and tragedy on one side and humor on the other. Except for the obligatory suicide, it has some big surprises in the story, due to extensive cinematic trickery.

The main character, Police Detective Sgt. Bruce Robertson (played by James McAvoy of “X-Men: Days of Future Past”) is one sick dude. He is determined to get a promotion to Detective Inspector, and he plans to get it by sabotaging the careers of his fellow officers, using various dirty tricks on them.

To Bruce, life is a game, “But nobody plays the games like me,” he thinks as he plans to play his fellow detectives against one another. In his mind his wife Carole (played by Shauna Macdonald of “The Descent,” who appears in dreamlike visions throughout the film) anticipates his promotion. The promotion will make both their lives better. Carole only backs winners, so Bruce needs to be the winner in the promotion game.

Bruce's big chance at a promotion is to crack the murder of a Japanese man. He was killed by a gang of local punks. The attack on the man is shown early in the film and Bruce has the inside track to solve the case, however he is in such bad shape mentally he is not making much progress solving the murder. He sees visions. Sometimes the people he is looking at suddenly look like they have grotesque animal heads. In the film these visions are accompanied by loud, piercing sounds. It is a very unpleasant experience, both for Bruce and this viewer.

Bruce is also an alcoholic. He uses cocaine and other drugs on a regular basis. Some appear to be prescription drugs. He has more severe mental problems too, including a kind of split personality. He is able to function as a policeman, but just barely. In a rare moment of candor, he tells a fellow detective, Amanda Drummond, what his life is really like, or at least something a lot closer to the truth than he tells anyone else, including himself. He tells her “There's something wrong with me. Something seriously wrong with me.” That's putting it mildly.

Bruce tells Amanda that he once was a good detective, but it is hard to see how, since his mental problems seem to date back to his childhood. Some of these deep-seated problems are revealed in fantasy sequences with a psychiatrist, Dr. Rossi (Jim Broadbent of “The Iron Lady”). At any rate, Bruce's life and his mind continue to unravel during the film.

The movie would have us pity Bruce because he is sick, but he is not just self-destructive, he also destroys or damages the lives of his family, friends and acquaintances. Bruce does terrible things to his best friend, Clifford Bladesey (Eddie Marsan of “Sherlock Holmes”) for no good reason. When Bladesey asks him why, he says simply “because I can.” It is hard to sympathize with Bruce because it appears he brought most of his problems on himself. He's not just sick. He is also evil.

This film does have an interesting soundtrack of vintage music, including a bit of “Silver Lady” (1977) by David Soul (star of “Starsky and Hutch” who also appears in the film) and Billy Ocean's “Love Really Hurts Without You” (1975) over the credits. In this film, fantasy and reality blend together in strange ways. There are outlandish visions, include a couple of fantasy sequences involving Nazis, and on all-too-brief music video-type scene (featuring the song “Silver Lady”) complete with backup singers who pop up in the back seat of a car.

If Bruce wasn't such a despicable character, this could be a movie I could get into, but as it is, I'll never watch it again, even though it is the kind of movie that invites multiple viewings to catch all the little tricks in the story. This is one of those movies where much of the non-Scottish audience would need subtitles and a Scottish slang dictionary to catch all the dialog. Sadly, I had neither, so a substantial amount of the dialog was lost on me. The film is also brimming with profanity and explicit sex scenes. It also has an absolutely amazing performance by James McAvoy. This film rates a C+.

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