Alvin’s Harmonious World of Opposites film review – splendid and strange

Writer/director Platon Theodoris’s low-budget curio of a mild-mannered man who never leaves his tiny apartment is weird, warped and not easily forgotten

Australian cinemagoers tend to be wary of locally made films billed as “quirky”. There’s a general feeling we’ve had too many of them for too long, the best associated with a stretch in the 1990s when several doozies fell off the assembly line including The Adventures of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert, Muriel’s Wedding and Welcome to Woop Woop.

Writer/director Platon Theodoris’s low budget curio, Alvin’s Harmonious World of Opposites, is certainly quirky, but not the kind Australian cinema is accustomed to. It’s more like something in the realm of Being John Malkovich, the crazy mental wilderness of Charlie Kaufman swapped out for a slighter and more sedate kind of fantasy.