Outside of God, Jan Švankmajer is the master of meat puppets. In Švankmajer's world, dripping-rare sirloins and freshly cut tongues can step out for a brisk walk around the block as well as you or me. But then really, aren't we all just so much fat, gristle and marrow on the hoof? The great Czech animator has, in his last few films, been happily marrying the carnal with carne, and the results have been carnage, but in a good way.

The idea — animated or otherwise — that the world's an abattoir is neither new nor startling. But in risking embrace of the cliché, Švankmajer has conjured up some memorable horrors and outrages that merrily present themselves to the strains of a calliope. Life isn't so much a butcher's block as a butcher's circus.

Lunatics is Švankmajer's latest wade through the slaughterhouse sluice of life, and it is in many ways his strongest film since Faust. Like Faust, Lunatics has literary antecedents. Švankmajer's tale appropriates the work of two great opposites: The Marquis de Sade and Edgar Allan Poe; the one giddy by total liberty in life, the other weighed down with the inevitability of death.

At a roadside inn on the way to the madhouse at Chareton (the Marquis' old stomping grounds), Jean Berlot (Pavel Liška) awakes from sleep to find two enormous ward attendants coming at him with a straightjacket. In his attempts to fend them off, he demolishes a good portion of his room. Berlot, however, is not actually awake, and the warders are merely nightmare guests that visit the lad on occasion. But his room is in shambles, as Berlot is also a somnambulist. The innkeeper must break down the door to get at Berlot before the entire building collapses.

Ostracized by the other guests at breakfast, Berlot is beckoned to the table of a peruked gentleman who is called the Marquis (Jan Tříska). The Marquis offers to take Berlot to Chareton in his carriage, and Berlot accepts. But the plans change halfway there, as the Marquis decides to have Berlot stay at his crumbling chateau as his guest. While at the chateau, Berlot witnesses a black mass that erupts (as all the better ones do) into a sadomasochistic orgy. Berlot is trapped.

What follows is a guided tour of the wider asylum outside the gates of Chareton, punctuated by Švankmajer's stop-action parade of a haggis chef's larder, with eyes and organs running about wild off the leash. But Švankmajer has a little secret in store for his ending, where these carefree carcass scraps meet a very familiar fate that could put carnivores off their diet.

As usual, Švankmajer's film is filled with vivid imagery and visual wit. The mad Marquis' insistence that not enough nails have been applied to the crucified Christ is one of the great moments of surrealist cinema, heading toward Bunuel's blasphemous coda in L'Age d'Or.

Třiska is mesmerizing as the de Sade figure, bringing an elfish quality to the Marquis that wisely avoids the calculated brazenness of Geoffrey Rush's de Sade in Quills, but might have benefited from a dash of Patrick Magee's magisterial iciness in Marat/Sade. Liška is also very good as the victimized Berlot. With his wan features and exhausted eyes, he's the innocent Everyman suddenly thrown into a fight-or-fall calamity.