Magical filmmaking. This is a film that you experience and feel, that glides over you working its magic. At points, it feels almost obtuse or unexplainable - in a rational sense -but it’s always compelling and moving, and this strangeness is why it works so well. It is utterly ethereal but not in any way you can pin down exactly. It is pure mood and evocation.

The aesthetic is astounding, the use of coloured filters gives everything a warm glow, and the look of stained glass. This fits in with central themes about fiction and reality, how the former can reflect and shape the latter but also warps it - for good or ill. It also enhances the sense of the uncanny, and the ideas of distance and connection. Glass returns time and time again as a motif, a view into something but a barrier from it.

The astonishingly moving music is so integral - as it would continue to be with the Three Colours films (from the same composer- operating under a fictional name that would later appear in those films). The film soars and glides on music, creating something spellbinding.