The 2001: A Space Odyssey of J-quirk cinema, Symbol is not a movie, but a visionary experience. Like Kubrick's mind-bender, it starts off slow, accumulating a mountain of mundane details, skipping between seemingly unconnected plotlines, and then, just when you think you know where it's going, it cracks open into a psychedelic trip that sends you out of the theater with your head vibrating like a tuning fork and lightning shooting out of your eyes.

Down in Mexico, Escargot Man, a masked wrestler, is getting ready for his latest match. He's getting on in years and it slowly becomes clear that his current opponents, the Devils from the North, are a vicious duo who might not let him leave the ring alive. Meanwhile, a man in pajamas (Matsumoto himself) wakes up in an all white room with no windows or doors. Desperate to escape, he begins devising wilder and wilder schemes to find an exit. When these two stories finally come crashing together in the last half hour, it's like having two 18-wheeled big rigs made of ideas smash together inside your brain.

Director and star, Hitoshi Matsumoto, is Japan's reigning comic genius. He and his comedy partner, Hamada Masatoshi, are the stand-up duo, Downtown, hosting four TV shows per week. They've written best sellers, released million-selling albums, and for many years in the 90's they paid the highest taxes in Japan. Matsumoto is viewed as the weirder of the two and his 2007 film, Dai Nipponjin (aka Big Man Japan), was proof. But that mockumentary about a giant superhero living like a loser in modern day Japan was just a warm-up for the existential, priapic comedy of Symbol. By turns bewildering, boring and bizarre, it's scatalogical and spiritual all at once, like watching a Shiva of stupidity, a goofy Ganesha or a Krazy Kali. After tripping on this flick, the world will never look the same to you again.