Brendan Fraser is Darkly Noon, a strange but cute young man from a repressive religious cult, who's found exhausted in the woods and befriended by sexy free spirit Ashley Judd.

Fraser finds his loins stirring for Judd, but his brain is stuck in his stark upbringing and, anyway, Judd already has a love of her own in the form of equally strange and hunky Viggo Mortensen.

A weird brew, indeed, and obviously no good will come of it, but the clever man who stirred it up, writer-director Philip Ridley, who made the equally distracting The Reflecting Skin, draws you headlong into its oddness.

He's got the cast as well as the imagination to make it work, and the admirable star trio - all on their way to bigger things - put all their acting weight and luminous presences (not to mention their bodies) behind it.

And, of course, different isn't just different - in this case it's good.