Dancer in the Dark is billed as a musical. It's the story of Selma (Björk), a Czech immigrant, and single mother working in a factory in rural America. Her salvation is her passion for music, specifically, the all-singing, all-dancing numbers found in classic Hollywood musicals.

Selma harbours a sad secret: she is losing her eyesight and her son stands to suffer the same fate if she can’t put away enough money to secure an operation for him. When a neighbour falsely accuses Selma of stealing his savings, the drama of her life escalates to the tragic finale.

Pardon me boys - Is this the Chattanooga choo-choo?

Björk’s character is, well, very Björk-like. She has the same nervous, edgy quality that comes across in her music. She comes across as a sensitive, trusting person, who would do anything to protect anyone close to her (like she did in real life attacking a reporter at Bangkok’s Don Muang Airport when she felt her son was being thrust into the media spotlight).

The dialogue seems largely improvised. It’s littered with lots of pregnant pauses. You can almost hear the actors’ brains whirring away, trying to come up with the next line. For me it doesn’t come across as the sometimes stilted and awkward conversation of everyday life, but rather sounds contrived and more acted than a more conventional style.

Not your conventional musical location - a sink factory

What sets the film apart is it's photographic style. Unlike other films which let your eyes focus on whatever interests them, in this the camera is dictatorial. It remains in extreme close-up a lot, only allowing you to look at the actor’s eyes and mouth, not even their full face.

The camera is restless throughout, quickly panning away from people when they’re still speaking to try to capture another person’s reactions.

This might sound like a great style for your more art-house movie but for me the wobbly quick moving image just induced motion sickness and made the film difficult to sit through.

A good story, but the film-making gets in the way of the movie. My world is still spinning.