Imagine you are holding one of those Russian pottery dolls, the ones that open to reveal a slightly smaller, otherwise identically fashioned doll inside. Open that one and you find another, then another, until there are no dolls left.

This time, though, there is no doll inside. In its place, you find a heap of warm, pulsating goo. You stare at the goo.

The universe is not what it should be.

This may be a poor metaphor - a touch on the heavy-handed side - but I think it evokes the sheer strangeness of watching Being John Malkovich, perhaps the oddest romp of a movie I have ever seen. It is a comedy about getting inside other people's heads, and it has the kick of a head trip, which is a clich even though the film is not. This film will polarize people. There will be many people who will hate this film as much as they have ever hated anything, who will break off relationships with dates who dare to enjoy it. And there are those (the odd Harvard student among them) who will treasure Being John Malkovich, and carry its lines around with them as talismans, and demand midnight retrospectives. John Malkovich should be very, very afraid.

A sublime garble of ideas, the film's pleasures are unlike the pleasures of almost any other marquee picture ever produced. This is a true screwball comedy in the classic sense, in which none of the characters are "straight men," and everyone is insane in their own, inimitably comic way. Here, unlike, say, Bringing up Baby or Flirting with Disaster, the world itself is insane and unstable, as if God himself were just another kook. It's like a wrestling match with the walls erased, and the rules unknown - you'd better watch your seat, because you might be sitting inside the ring.

The wrestlers in this film, ostensibly, are Craig and Lotte Schwartz (Cameron Diaz and John Cusack). You'd scarcely know that it was either of these actors just from looking at the images; the photogenic stars have been outfitted for the film with the scraggliest wigs, worst make-up, and dowdiest clothes in greater New York City. They look awful, and it looks fantastic. You can practically savor Diaz's joy at proving that she's a "real" actress and not just another pretty face. Craig and Lotte are an absurd, sexless married couple - pet store junkie and street puppeteer - fighting for the affections of mean, unattainable Maxine (Catherine Keener). The world they exist in at first resembles the Kafkaesque wilds of a Terry Gilliam creation. Nimble-fingered Cusack, for instance, gets a job manning file cabinets on the 7 1/2th floor of a downtown high-rise built specially for the short-statured: the rent is great but the ceilings are barely five feet tall. Though watching Cusack stoop down and stumble around the office hallways is funny, the film knows how dull these sorts of gags could become, and puns lamely on the "low overhead" of the floor enough to make the lameness itself the joke. Fundamentally, Charlie Kaufman's offbeat screenplay is less interested in visual punning than in sickly toying with the characters themselves.

The greatest toy the movie has to play with is the participation of real-life actor John Malkovich, playing himself with perversity and panache. The film brings him into the plot with characteristic audacity; Cusack discovers a secret door at work that leads directly into the inside of Malkovich's brain. He becomes famous Malkovich for fifteen minutes (get it?), and is then spit out onto the side of the New Jersey Turnpike. It is to the film's credit that this bizarre, supernatural turn of events doesn't jar the logical tone of the movie at all. Getting inside Malkovich's head isn't even the twistiest twist that Being John Malkovich has to offer.

Still, it must be said, John Horatio Malkovich quickly becomes the heart of the film. We see the world through his eyes, and feel a little bit of the charge the characters get from experiencing real life in Malkovich's brain. The camera-eye gimmick goes on just long enough that we don't think that we'll really get to see John Malkovich himself, until all of a sudden he enters as another insane player in this mad roundelay. He all but overwhelms the movie with the question mark of his celebrity and the eerie charisma in his way of speaking. So fierce in Dangerous Liaisons, so intense in In the Line of Fire, and so bold on stage, he has his share of glory and groupies (which should by all rights increase manifold after this movie's release).

Simply put, Malkovich is no agreeable Tom Cruise heartthrob. John Malkovich is, fundamentally, creepy. (This isn't just my opinion; I have taken a poll of eight people, and seven agree. The eighth has a crush on him.) John Malkovich doesn't have any of the usual qualities of Hollywood stardom - the symmetrical, chiseled looks, the measured voice, the stolid evenness. Malkovich is bizarre by comparison, with beady eyes at inappropriate moments and a sneer of a voice which sounds more like somebody choking than talking. You can imagine this movie being born out of a stoned conversation about the weirdness of John Malkovich's success, and the weirdness of being him. Whoa: that could be a movie, man.

This surrealistic feat, finally, is what the film comes to explore. Malkovich's is the performance of a brave oddball genius; he plays himself as an effete, monstrous perv, the perfect centerpiece for a film about the insanity of pretension. First-time director Spike Jonze, a longtime music video artiste, has filmed it with collaborator Lance Acord to underplay the fantastic elements of the storyline and accentuate the dirty realness of the images; the plot is deeply surreal, but the setting is today's world, crazy as it actually is.

The effect is fantastic, and frightening. Watching Being John Malkovich feels a bit like being a frog in a pan of slowly warmed water - after a while the water is boiling, but you can hardly tell the difference. Little by little, things change, until you're somewhere you never intended to be at all.