A documentary by Belinda Sallin. In Swiss German, German, and English, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable.

As morbid visionaries go, H.R. Giger seemed like a pretty swell guy. The Swiss artist is barely ambulatory and hardly more vocal in this immersive doc, which wrapped only months before its subject tumbled down the stairs of his cluttered, other-dimensional Zurich home and died at the age of 74.

But he’s surrounded by wives new and old, friends, and assorted assistants, including Thomas Gabriel Fischer, the founder of avant-metal band Celtic Frost (who gives an emotional account of the salving effect Giger’s images had on his own battered psyche).

Filmmaker Belinda Sallin is content to let these folks do most of the talking, and even the ex-wives are hard-pressed to bitch about the old man. (Some are still working for him.) What emerges is a warm, if not especially penetrating, portrait of an artist with an unmatched genius for externalizing a universally powerful and very deep sense of dread.

Transpersonal therapy guru Stanislav Grof is there to nail it, yammering on about perinatal trauma as he wanders through Giger’s garden, which is festooned with all manner of nightmarish bric-a-brac, not to mention the world’s raddest miniature train.

At most, we’re left to ponder the impact of two childhood events, and the more obviously devastating suicide of his first love, Li Tobler, whose image peers from so many of Giger’s early and most famous works (not counting the creature he designed for Alien). But the insights end there, perhaps necessarily, since there might be no reasonable explanation for the access Giger had to his store of unconscious imagery. Describing his seemingly automatic technique, Giger’s agent Leslie Barany remarks, “I thought he was channelling something, and I don’t believe in those things.”

Barany also notes that his client was “at one” with his airbrush. If you’re looking for evidence of the continuum that exists between the artist and his art, it would seem that H.R. Giger was something of a biomechanoid himself, though evidently a very human one.