Starring Dan Beirne. In English and French, with English subtitles. Rated 14A

To get the most out of The Twentieth Century, you pretty much need to 1) be Canadian and/or have an intense interest in Canadian history; 2) have some working knowledge of silent-movie tropes and the kind of theatrical storytelling favoured in the time of Metropolis and later by filmmakers under the spell of retro-obsessive Guy Maddin and the Winnipeg School of Warp-o-Matic Silver Screen Time Machines; and 3) enjoy gender-fluid representation of history in which sex and ethnicity run closer to Monty Python and Benny Hill than they do to Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein.

Congratulations! If you meet these criteria, you’re ready for the 90 whirligig minutes of confusingly titled cinematic madness for the fatally discriminating viewer. Just prepare for the reality that you will get lost no matter how much, or how little, you know about the actual life and political history of William Lyon Mackenzie King, 10th prime minister of Canada—the longest-serving and perhaps least understood of the bunch.

The man was cryptic by nature, and the performance of Fargo’s Dan Beirne as a youthful version of the mother-fixated PM doesn’t exactly illuminate him. In the reckoning of writer-director Matthew Rankin—a Winnipegger who relocated to Mon­treal—the pre-Parliament King is a kind of holy virgin, destined to lead a semigreat nation out of the old-stock Commonwealth and onto the world stage. Or something. He’s also a kind of northern Jack Tripper, pulling an awkward Three’s Company with the plain nurse who loves him (Sarianne Cormier) and the golden goddess (up-and-comer Catherine St-Laurent) who’s just too far above him.

The latter’s a daughter of Canada’s surprisingly all-powerful governor general (Seán Cullen), standing in for everything the new country needs to get away from. Or something. Intimations of incest, gay love, and interracial dynamics in a tale utterly unmindful of any First Nations presence tend to be a bit on the icky side, and take place against the kind of primitive cutout sets that Dr. Caligari dreamed of in muted colour. In any case, it all ends in a surprisingly bloody battle royale on the ice. Because what else could it do? And that’s without getting into the parade of ejaculating cactus plants. O, Canada.