Well, Chariot’s a movie. It has a beginning, middle, and end… I think. Probably. It’s certainly abstract and weird… you might even charitably say its Lynchian. It sure is something… but I’m not convinced its anything at the same time.

Ostensibly, the film is about a young man who has the same uneventful dream every night of his life. He goes to a therapist in hopes to end the dreams and, in the meantime, moves into an apartment full of odd people. Like this one guy who floats down the hall… this seems unusual to him but not <i>too</i> unusual. He asks a friend about the floating man and she says, “Yeah, he does that.” No big deal. Moving on. The rest of the movie is just strange conversations with strange people and other random odd events.

The studio’s description of the movie tells you more about what the movie’s about than the movie ever says (except maybe in cryptic chapter titles). It claims its about a company that helps with the reincarnation process. I guess? Or it could be the fever dream of a mad house cat, or the final thoughts of Baron von Richthofen before his biplane smashes into the ground, or what starlight thinks about when it thinks about starlight.

The movie does co-star John Malkovich in a frizzy red wig…. so there’s that performance to be briefly fascinated by. Rosa Salazar is in it and she’s lovely.

None of this really makes sense… and even a vague explanation from Malkovich near the end doesn’t satisfy or really explain anything. Cryptic and weird movies can work if you find the right tone or offer enough tasty hints. Maybe if I watched this again and got into late-night philosophical debates with random people on message boards, it would all start to become clear. But the movie’s just not interesting enough for that. I mean, other cryptic movies like Mother! or Lost Highway evince such discussions… nothing in this rather bland movie inspires me to think any further than this sentence.

Score: 64