The Hanging Garden.

Family reunions would seem to be the stuff of great movies. What could be more universal? The kids demonize their parents, the parents infantilize their grown kids, the skeletons come boogying out of the closet, and--when things get too hot--the camera pans over to get a reaction shot from the pet Saint Bernard, who looks like he'd rather be on death row in the local pound.

And yet directors forever stumble over themselves trying to concretize an experience that is, in the final wash, internal and ineffable. Either they strangulate emotion into the cinematic equivalent of catatonia (The Myth of Fingerprints) or they shovel on the family eccentricity with a forklift (Home for the Holidays), celebrating the very craziness that sent them fleeing in terror from the nest and into ridiculously expensive film schools.

Then The Hanging Garden gets it all so right--the surreal quality of the familiar made new, the out-of-body conversations between child and adult selves, the queasy whoosh of surprise epiphanies--you wonder why it's never been done quite this way before.

Perhaps it helped that an aspiring auteur named Thom Fitzgerald fled New York City, not for Hollywood but for the relatively saner shores of Nova Scotia. This verdant Canadian province provides the home front to which Fitzgerald's gay protagonist, Sweet William (Chris Leavins), returns after a ten-year absence to attend the wedding of his sister Rosemary (Kerry Fox) and his boyhood chum Fletcher (Joel S. Keller).

It's a childhood home to die for, a big old white wooden affair with nooks and crannies and an enveloping garden cultivated to an Edenesque fare-thee-well by William's father (Peter MacNeill). It doesn't take long into William's (late) arrival at the garden wedding for us to sniff out trouble in paradise. Dad is a mean drunk, mom (Seana McKenna) is emotionally parched, grandma is wigging out from Alzheimer's, a young tomboy sister (Christine Dunsworth) has suddenly appeared, the aging dog is half blind, Rosemary seems more enamored of her brother than of her fiance, and even Fletcher seems to have eyes for the returning son.

In a seamless meshing of flashbacks, we see the comely William juxtaposed with his former self: first as a young child abused by a tyrant father who loves only his plants and then as a preternaturally obese adolescent (Troy Veinotte in a heroic performance) shielding himself against insults and diddling with Fletcher in the garden. That incident prompts the film's single most horrifically droll scene, as William's mother, Iris, drags her son off to a neighbor to be initiated into the splendors of the opposite sex.

The Hanging Garden takes its title from a moment of desperation in which the teenage William nooses himself to a tree. Whether or not the boy's suicide attempt was ever consummated is a point of ambiguity that heightens Fitzgerald's voluptuous atmosphere of familial mysteries. This is one of the most sheerly metaphysical films I can recall seeing, a quality that owes less to the family's punishing Irish Catholicism than to the filmmaker's brazen strategy of stylization, in which characters are named for flowers and are wedded to an appropriate color scheme.

It's so out there that it works. Fitzgerald's beauteous and ultimately optimistic vision is enhanced by a yummy wealth of Celtic sounds via such artists as fiddler Ashley MacIsaac, who also has a bit role in the film. The cast is uniformly excellent, although the screen really seems to crackle whenever the quirky Fox (An Angel at My Table) blows on. The filmmaker doesn't finally supply us with enough childhood evidence of the bond that eventually grows between her character and William. The reservations begin and end there. I can't wait to see this movie again.