The Freaks of Fancy, writer/director Elliott Léon’s sophomore feature, may well be the oddest film I’ve ever seen. That’s not meant in a disrespectful way. I like weird. I seek out weird films. Some of my closest friends are weird films. (Although you do have to be careful with weird. Cultivated intentionally weird weird, weird in quotation marks, the type of weird that certain big name directors make their livings from – my first weird; drives me nuts and not in a good way. Isn’t this weird, it screams, feeling decidedly commonplace.)

But The Freaks of Fancy circumvents all my previous definitions of weird and that can only be a good thing, surely. It’s really weird. Downright odd. Most peculiar.

As I watched The Freaks of Fancy I thought of flickery old silent movies, Kate Bush videos, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, 4AD Records artwork, Einstein a Go-Go – all these things and many more fluttered through my mind. Overall, there’s a German Expressionist aesthetic, undercut by (at points) almost soapy dialogue and acting. It’s a strange mix that led to my feeling unmoored and unsure where this film was going, but no less compelled to keep watching.

Plot-wise, things sound simple on paper – it’s 1927 and four graduate medical students win a weekend at their professor’s island mansion. The professor is a suspicious character and no stranger to trialling new drugs on unknowing persons. You might imagine where it’s heading. But TFoF is a film built as much on atmosphere as on plot or characters.

The four friends attempt to navigate their uncomfortable weekend away with varying degrees of success. Drink is drunk and drugs are imbibed, consciously and unconsciously. Rachel Brownstein and Holly Lovelady, playing Gloria Tether and cocaine-carrying Cely-An Thorp, are the stand outs; one particular scene where they go fishing is for my money the prettiest in the film, the two women shrouded by nature that’s more malevolent than lush, swapping home truths until their ‘fun’ is cut short by the proprietorial professor, urging them to come back to the house for more secretly drugged drinks.

The film was partially crowd funded and director Léon has tweeted about its ‘microbudget’, but this has clearly inspired him to use his limitations as inspirations. From start to end, the film is tinted in various shades, beiges and yellows and pinks and oranges, sometimes flickering from one to another mid-scene. Touches like this, and careful framing - ofttimes characters seem overwhelmed by their surroundings with the features of rooms seeming to skulk around them threateningly – go a long way towards emolliating budgetary concerns. There are a couple of moments where the realities of making a feature on a shoestring show through: some hard to hear dialogue and an under-par performance or two, but these examples add to the film’s charm, making it seem even more like some strange curate’s egg.

I don’t want to ruin the climax of the film, suffice to say it earns its horror classification and has a pleasingly incomplete ending without being in any way unsatisfying. There’s nastiness and gore and no sense of morality, another bonus point for me.

I wonder if all I’ve said here has in any way matched up to my initial claim that this is the oddest film I’ve ever seen? Probably not, but maybe that means you should try to see it and find out for yourself? I’ve not even mentioned the musical number, or the dance scenes montaged with vintage military footage.

The Freaks of Fancy seems to be part of Léon’s admirable and worthy mission to put his immediate environs on the map and on the big screen. The film is shot around the Lake District using local actors and there seems to be some plundering of myths and true tales from the region with possible nods to Henry Segrave’s fatal 1930 attempt to break the water speed record. Something lurks beneath the lakes and, satisfyingly, it’s never made clear quite what it is.

I can envisage Elliott Léon honing his craft and going onto make something completely idiosyncratic and amazing, and I hope he gets the opportunity. The Freaks of Fancy might not be quite that, but it’s genuinely refreshing to see a creator attempting to do something so ambitious and so 100% their own thing.