By Simon Thompson
It’s a pretty rare occurrence where I see a movie which genuinely stumps me. Still, Joe Badon’s The Wheel of Heaven had me in a perpetual state of a feeling which I would describe as being a combination of Krusty The Clown watching Worker and Parasite and the effects of eating a vast portion of cheesy chips after a long sesh. The basic plot of Wheel of Heaven centres around a young woman struggling with a series of unhealthy relationships finding a strange book in a second-hand shop and being sucked into the book’s contents. What follows is a series of meta sketches (containing various parodies of American public access TV) which form a narrative in themselves punctuated by behind-the-scenes footage of the movie’s production.
Tonally I would describe The Wheel of Heaven as being an episode of Tim and Eric’s Awesome Show Great Job! by way of David Lynch and Shane Carruth. Like Shane Carruth’s work, it’s a kind of commentary on art/filmmaking itself and like David Lynch, Badon juxtaposes dissonant soundscapes and surreal imagery with a kind of warm Americana.
From a comedic standpoint, Badon is a disciple of anti-humour, the central conceit of which is the idea of a joke being so unfunny that it’s funny. Now this is of course an extremely marmitey form of comedy which you’ll either love or loathe, but speaking as someone who’s a huge fan of shows like Tim and Eric, Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared, Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place, and Nathan For You most of the humour pretty much landed with me.
The biggest problem with The Wheel of Heaven is that it has too many original ideas without a really strong central narrative to act as a ballast. Badon’s vision would have been better served by placing all of the individual vignettes into 12-20 minute TV episodes rather than trying to tie them around the three-act structure of a feature-length movie. So, to conclude, The Wheel of Heaven is a strangely enjoyable curio, while I won’t go out of my way to call it a masterpiece, it is a work so odd and individualistic that it is at least worth a quick glance.
Watch the trailer for The Wheel of Heaven below –
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