Jim Jarmusch returns to the big screen with another quirky beatnik poem of a film that deals with abstract existential ideas through the medium of abstract existential characters. The resulting story exudes a dreamlike quality that makes watching it a surreal experience.

The plot is a simple one. Jarmusch regular Isaach De Bankol plays a lone man who has travelled to Spain for some unknown criminal purpose. Whilst there he receives daily visits from co-conspirators who provide with two things: a mysterious code inside matchbox, and a short philosophical monologue on a topic of their choice. This relentlessly linear progression towards an unclear conclusion is a uniquely simple way of holding viewer attention.

But though the structure is simple, the content certainly is not. The philosophical excerpts we are treated to are often dense, occasionally glib, but mostly are confusing. Lacking broader context, the audience is forced to try and piece these intellectual snippets together in the same ham-fisted way we try to collate the fragmented rebus-moments of our dreams.

If you’re a Jarmusch fan, it’s less hard because he returns to familiar themes (particularly to those expounded in his raw first feature Permanent Vacation). He also makes it easier to get into the ideas by having them spoken by idiosyncratic characters who frequently embody or explain their subject of choice. These characters, which include an illustrious list of names from John Hurt to Gael Garca Bernal, and, of course, Bill Murray, lack the quirkily likeable natures cultivated so well in films like Down By Law and Night on Earth, but they exude an abstract essence that serves to coldly embody their own particular theme in a way which forces the audience to be absorbed into them.

If this rigid formalism is beginning to sound tiresome, fear not, for Christopher Doyle’s cinematography creates a dreamy landscape which frames this formal exposition of ideas perfectly. Though the dialogue and the broader meaning to be drawn from this film remain hard work, the hazy colouring and beautifully shot architecture of every scene make it significantly easier to sink into this realm of ideas Jarmusch has so painstakingly created.

But it is this painstakingly deliberate creation of each moment that makes the film so difficult to enjoy. In fact, The Limits of Control is a title that could easily be a metaphor for Jim Jarmusch’s filmmaking approach itself: he constantly seeks to impose a rigid style and structure that meticulously convey his ideas, but in so doing he neglects the natural human connections that make the medium more accessible to audiences and therefore makes his ideas, however carefully crafted, that much further out of reach.

It’s an interesting and unique experience, and one which Jarmusch fans really must see. But for the broader cinema-going public it could prove a frustrating experience that will leave you cold.

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By: Mike Edwards