Charlie Countryman

Charlie (Shia LaBeouf) is coping with the recent death of his mother. He’s also dodging violent gangsters on the rain-slicked streets of Bucharest, Romania, and trying to win the love of a newly orphaned concert cellist, played by Evan Rachel Wood. (Here we pause, briefly, to savour every detail of that description.) More than once, another character suggests Charlie’s Romanian adventure might be some kind of fantasy, which – at least in cinematic terms – is right on the money. Our hero gets the snot knocked out of him by accented bad guys (Mads Mikkelsen and Til Schweiger) and takes ecstasy with Rupert ‘Ron Weasley’ Grint.

It’s almost as hard to dislike music-video veteran Fredrik Bond’s first feature as it is to follow it. ‘Charlie Countryman’ is, let’s be clear, one mess of a draggy, hyperstylised romantic thriller. But it’s an engrossing, overstuffed disaster – sometimes captivating, sometimes too ingeniously terrible to turn away from. It’s like watching a car crash in slow motion, if both cars were stuffed with confetti.