A thoroughly original accomplishment of a high artistic order, Northfork features flawless, spare production design by Ichelle Spitzig and the Polish brothers' father, Del, and cinematographer M. David Mullen's striking images slide effortlessly into Dalí-like Surrealism.

The movie elegantly mingles drama, comedy, and low-key spiritual resonance. It also has a splendid cast.

There has never been a movie quite like Northfork… The movie is visionary and elegiac, more a fable than a story, and frame by frame, it looks like a portfolio of spaces so wide, so open, that men must wonder if they have a role beneath such indifferent skies.

With their third film, the Polish brothers find their authorial voice, resulting in a lyrical work whose free-floating Lynchian weirdness coalesces into an unexpectedly touching movie.

There is nothing quite like this movie, and I'm not altogether sure there is much more to it than its lovely peculiarity. But at a moment when so many films strive to be obvious and interchangeable as possible, it is gratifying to find one that is puzzling, subtle and handmade.

Love it or hate it, Northfork is a cinematic vision (visually and textually) unlike any with which most moviegoers, even arthouse regulars, will be familiar.

Gets under your skin with its graceful edits and poetic elisions, lovely performances, and faded imagery.

Strictly a love it-or-hate-it proposition, it requires viewers to work at a movie with a narrative that could support at least half a dozen interpretations.

A love letter to the state of Montana and a landscape that is biblical in its desolation and splendor.

Stark, mysterious, and often weirdly funny.

Northfork may be doomed, but the Polish brothers and cinematographer M. David Mullen (who worked with the brothers on their previous features, "Twin Falls, Idaho" and "Jackpot") make the place feel like heaven on earth.

Isn't everyone's cup of tea -- as the Polishes admit in a clever bit of critical preemption -- but it possesses an undeniable, haunting grandeur.

This is very much the bargain that Northfork offers an audience: Buy into the brothers' elegiac meditation on angels, Eden, and the death of American innocence or sit back and scoff at it as so much David Lynch lite.

I predict Northfork will give you food for reflection or a case of the hives. I stopped scratching 20 minutes into the movie, settled into its lulling rhythm and floated away into the Polish brothers' flaky, austere dreamworld.