Producers: Alejandro G. Iñárritu and Stacy Perskie Kaniss   Director: Alejandro G. Iñárritu   Screenplay: Alejandro G. Iñárritu and Nicolás Giacobone   Cast: Daniel Giménez Cacho, Griselda Siciliani, Ximena Lamadrid, Íker Solano, Luz Jiménez, Luis Couturier, Andrés Almeida, Clementina Guadarrama, Jay O. Sanders, Francisco Rubio, Fabiola Guajardo, Noé Hernández and Ivan Massagué   Distributor: Netflix

Grade: C

It’s sometimes difficult to determine exactly the point at which directorial flamboyance turns into mere self-indulgence, or even if it does (does it happen in “Citizen Kane,” or “Touch of Evil,” or “The Trial”?), but by the end of Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s “Bardo,” you’ll feel confident in saying that in this case it has.  The Mexican-born director has always been prone to extravagance, but here he takes the proclivity to extremes, in terms of running-time (more than two-and-a-half hours, even after some cuts) as well as its feverish flights of imagination and pretention.  Even the subtitle, like the one he appended to his Oscar winner “Birdman,” cheekily underscores a claim to importance.

The film is yet another attempt to emulate Federico Fellini’s 1963 “8½,” a masterpiece of introspection that’s proven cinematic catnip for other directors anxious to engage in similar exercises in surrealistic self-examination.  As his surrogate Iñárritu presents Silverio Gama (Daniel Giménez Cacho), who left his career as a TV host in Mexico to go to the United States, where he became a celebrated documentary filmmaker; at one points a clip from one of his works is shown, in which an incarcerated drug lord called El Ajolote (Noé Hernández) discourses creepily on his relationship to the wider society.

The amphibian motif of his nickname is central to the explanatory context of “Bardo,” which is a term in Tibetan Buddhism referring to the state between death and rebirth, though in Spanish it means a poet or singer of tales (also applicable here).  One of the early images in the film is of Gama riding a Los Angeles commuter train with a plastic bag filled with water and a number of axolotls in his lap.  The sequence is resumed late in the film to present a very literal explication of the fractured cavalcade of memories and experiences that have intervened, introduced by the striking introductory image of a human shadow sweeping across a barren, rocky landscape—just the first of many extraordinary visuals contrived by the director and cinematographer Darius Khondji, all accompanied by an eerie score by Iñárritu and Bryce Dessner and an evocative sound design by Nicolas Becker and Martín Hernández.  (Eugenio Caballero’s production design and Anna Terrazas’ costumes are no less impressive.)

What comes in the long middle reveals several preoccupations.  One is Gama’s obsession over the death of his first child, a boy who—in the feverish imagination of his father and mother—is depicted as refusing to emerge from the womb, with the umbilical cord stretching down a hallway.  Gama and his wife Lucía (Griselda Siciliani), along with their grown children Camila (Ximena Lamadrid) and teen Lorenzo (Íker Solano), have never truly come to terms with the loss, but will finally achieve a sort of closure.

A second is the contrast between Gama’s love of his native country and his guilt over leaving it for greener professional pastures, and between the ease of his departure and the struggle of immigrants now to make it across the border.  Much involves him returning with his family to Mexico to accept an award.  On his way he hears a news report that Amazon is buying Baja California, and then he meets with the American ambassador (Jay O. Sanders) at Castillo de Chapultepec, where suddenly the battle that occurred there in 1847 between American forces and young Mexican soldiers explodes around them again.  Those Mexican soldiers will briefly reappear in a contentious scene toward the close when the family returns to LAX and a Mexican-American security officer (Omar Leyva) brusquely tells them they cannot claim the U.S. as their home.  Endemic class differences are also portrayed in a scene in which the family’s maid Hortensia (Clementina Guadarrama) is turned away from a pool at an upscale resort.

There’s also a particularly nightmarish sequence in which Gama winds through the streets of a city where pedestrians suddenly drop to the pavement, though not dead, and then finds a pile of corpses with Hernán Cortés sitting atop them; after he and the conquistador converse for a while, the corpses begin to rise and leave, revealing that the scene is the shoot of the very episode we’re watching.  A similar conceit occurs elsewhere, in an early sequence when Gama visit the set of a popular TV program called “Supongamos” (“Let’s Suppose”), hosted by Luis (Francisco Rubio), the colleague he abandoned years before, only to sit mute before a laughing audience as Luis lambastes him for, among other things, a pretentious film that from the description seems to be the one we’re watching.  Later it’s revealed that Gama never showed up for the interview as Luis comes to the awards party to berate the movie as “a mishmash of pointless scenes…It feels stole, plagiarized.”

In a deserted restroom at that same party, Gama is visited by the spirit of his dead father Usandro (Luis Couturier), and morphs a child, but with Silverio’s grown-up head on its shoulders.  (The visual effects throughout were supervised by Guillaume Rocheron and Olaf Wendt.)  When Silverio complains “Success has been my biggest failure,” his father’s curt replay is “Depression is a bourgeois ailment.”  Translation: “Get over it.”  Gama also visits his lonely, ill mother Maria (Luz Jiménez), enfeebled by dementia, who can barely remember the past.  But she joins him in a finale where he joins immigrants heading northward, who may or may not miraculously disappear along the way.

What is one to make of all this, which is only the tip of the iceberg in a film rich with hypnotic images but groaning under the weight of its own self-importance?  One might be inclined to agree that its mesmerizing but chaotic content is meant to reflect nihilistic comments that recur periodically along with way—“”Life is nothing but a series of idiotic images,” one character argues, and Silverio’s father observes, “Life is just a brief series of senseless events.”  Certainly the arguably random arrangement of scenes as edited by Iñárritu and Mónica Salazar will suggest to some that such is the case.

But it’s doubtful that Iñárritu intends “Bardo,” another of his magna opera, is such a dismissive way.  He has something definite on his mind, though the film raises so many issues without presenting them in a definitely hierarchical fashion that it’s frustrating to try to figure out exactly what.  One thing is certain: though most of the cast is just passable, Cacho spares nothing in his effort to represent the director to the utmost.  That his performance is often over-the-top as a result is perhaps beside the point.

“Bardo” is being shown on Netflix, which is a pity; some of us had the opportunity to see it in a theatre with a huge screen and state-of-the-art sound system, which is what it really deserves—because it’s as an immersive visual and aural experience that it primarily merits attention.

Producers: Jason Blum, James Wan, Michael Clear and Couper Samuelson  Director: Gerard Johnstone  Screenplay: Akela Cooper  Cast: Allison Williams, Violet McGraw, Ronny Chieng, Brian Jordan Alvarez, Jen Van Epps, Stephane Garneau-Monten, Lori Dungey, Amie Donald, Jenna Davis, Amy Usherwood and Jack Cassidy   Distributor: Universal Pictures

Grade: C

For two-thirds of its running-time “M3GAN”—an acronym for Model 3 Generative Android, by the way—is an amusingly creepy example of the ever-popular demon doll genre, with a nice if underdeveloped satirical edge.  But the last third deteriorates into dreary mayhem, unimaginatively delivered.

One can easily detect the DNA of numerous movies at work here, from classy fare like “A.I.: Artificial Intelligence” and “Ex Machina” to crude slasher stuff like the “Chucky” franchise or—to mention a nearly forgotten Wes Craven effort from 1986 that comes closer than most, “Deadly Friend,” even if the robot monster there isn’t a doll but a real girl.  But Akela Cooper has added some elements to the mix that at first give the movie some comic fizz.

The first is a jab at the toy industry, in this case the Funki Company, and its best-selling PurRpetual Pet, a sort of ultra-interactive Furby that can poop as well as talk.  The firm’s volcanic boss David (Ronny Chieng, explosively overwrought) is pressuring his chief robotics engineer Gemma (Allison Williams) to come up with a cheaper model to counter the less expensive copies flooding the market, but she’s instead been secretly siphoning off some of the research budget to fund her passion project M3GAN, a weirdly lifelike doll that will bond by touch with a specific child, programmed to use her vast store of knowledge to become not only the owner’s best friend but teacher and general babysitter.  The very idea of such a contraption not only mocks the toy and electronic industry’s search for profitable products that will keep kids constantly entranced (and encourage their desire for more), but parents’ desire to transfer child-rearing responsibilities from themselves to mechanical surrogates without much concern for the consequences.

David is initially furious that Gemma and her colleagues Tess (Jen Van Epps) and Cole (Brian Jordan Alvarez) are wasting company resources on the project, which fails miserably when they’re forced to introduce an unfinished prototype to him. But against his orders they persist, eventually coming up with a model that knocks his socks off when he sees it/her (played by Amie Donald, with a digitized face and a voice provided by Jenna Davis) interacting with Gemma’s little niece Cady (Violet McGraw).

Cady has recently been orphaned, her parents having been killed in a bizarre accident, struck head-on by a snow plow when, squabbling, they stopped their rental car in the middle of a road during a blizzard (a scene that might leave some viewers queasy, given Jeremy Renner’s recent injury).  Cady, playing with her PurRpetual Pet in the back seat, was bruised but survived, and Gemma has become her guardian, though she’s one of those self-absorbed “bachelor parent” types unprepared to raise a child, as the social worker (Amy Usherwood) mandated to check on them infers from her visits.

When Gemma brings Cady to work with her, it’s the amazing immediate rapport between the girl and the improved M3GAN that convinces David to make the development of the project a priority.  Gemma is persuaded to take the prototype home so that Cady can cement the bond–in effect a continuation of the testing process.  But of course the relationship deepens on both sides to a degree that leads the doll to become Cady’s super-protector, and as the robot’s independence increases it/she uses powers in more and more aggressive ways.  Whether it’s the annoying next-door neighbor (Lori Dungey) and her troublesome dog or the bully (Jack Cassidy) who torments Cady at a school fair, M3GAN takes charge, and they suffer fates that escalate in violence.  It’s not long before some of the the folks back at Funki, where a public unveiling of the company’s new star is imminent, suffer severe consequences as well, including a nervous gofer named Kurt (Stephane Garneau-Monten) who’s been squirreling away data files about M3GAN’s technology, presumably for sale to other companies, although in the end little is made of that subplot.  But naturally the focus finally comes back to Gemma and Cady, who must deal with the doll’s now clearly maniacal proclivities.

“M3GAN” starts out more smartly than most of these mad-science-goes-berserk movies, but as the story progresses the cleverness recedes and the horror clichés accumulate.  What began as potentially sly satire about the toy business and absent parenting is replaced by snarky remarks from the doll that are less grating than Chucky’s, especially as Davis delivers them, in a tone more neutral than Brad Dourif’s wink-wink style.  (Actually, at the press screening M3GAN’s funniest lines came before the picture began: in remarks periodically inserted into a publicity card on the screen it/she advised viewers with increasing severity how to behave while watching the movie.  It would be wise of Universal to include the bit with public showings, too.)  But though there’s an attempt to include some witty visual touches in the later carnage, only in the scene involving the bully do they really work.

By the standards of the genre, “M3GAN” is adequate in most respects.  Gerard Johnstone’s direction is okay, and Jeff McEvoy’s editing is fairly crisp.  Kim Sinclair’s production design is a bit chintzy in the Funki scenes, but overall acceptable, and the visual effects team supervised by Melissa Brockman have managed to make the title character a nicely surrealistic mix of the real and the unreal.  Simon Raby’s cinematography is decent, and Anthony Willis’ score does its job.  And though Williams is curiously pallid as the misguided Frankenstein stand-in, young McGraw does surprisingly well in a part whose emotional range would test an adult.  The rest of the cast tends toward exaggeration, but in an over-the-top movie like this, one can hardly complain.

Compared to the “Chucky” movies and their like, “M3GAN” is actually sophisticated, at least at the start.  But it fails to maintain its early promise through to the end.