The interplay among horror, mysticism, soap opera, and camp forms the perverse melody of Brother of Sleep, which follows a musical genius through a lifetime of artistic triumphs and romantic disappointments. As adapted by Austrian author Robert Schneider from his own florid novel, this is, in many ways, a typical film portrait of the artist as a tortured wretch, re-proving the maxim that passionate musicmaking and passionate lovemaking don't mix. Indeed, the film can't help sounding familiar notes from Amadeus and Farinelli. The style, however, is something else: moments of intense surrealism bump against the cruel details of early 19th-century village life, and the ingratiating plot twists are accentuated by dialogue that wouldn't seem out of place in one of Saturday Night Live's medieval parodies. ("They say the devil has cold sperm," one character remarks.) Although performed in period costume, Brother of Sleep seems the definition of postmodern cinema.

The film opens with its genius protagonist literally coming to life through music; emerging stillborn, the infant Elias Johannes Alder is miraculously revived by a midwife's humming. Almost immediately, the boy begins to display uncanny gifts for both music and clairvoyance that scare his fellow townspeople. Classmates tease him for claiming to feel the notes from an organ penetrating his skin; even his own mother is made to shiver from his precocious intelligence and gold-tinged eyes that earn him notoriety as the devil's son. To the viewer, he seems more a victim of circumstance.

Although Elias enjoys a brief period of musical renown in early adulthood (at which point he's played by Andre Eisermann), Brother of Sleep makes it clear that this prodigy is fated to suffer the town's horrible fear and prejudice. Thus the film becomes a study of how one's talent and personality are invariably shaped by the surrounding environment -- and, in this case, how they're stifled by it. No coincidence, then, that the characters seem dwarfed by the gorgeous Alpine landscape. Director Joseph Vilsmaier (Stalingrad) is a former cinematographer who continues to shoot his own films, and his majestic widescreen images here evince a cosmic irony: the hills are alive with the sound and fury of predestination. There's a distinct God's-eye perspective in the director's mix of mountainous helicopter shots and blaring church hymns -- but in the context of a film about the cruelties of fate, these convey not reverence so much as wrath.

Everything in the frame seems imposing. Likewise, once the hypersensitive Elias gets stuck on Elsbeth (Dana Vavrova) -- the woman whose presence he'd felt as a child, but who is "intended" for another guy (Detlef Bothe) -- the outcome of the narrative is foretold. Experiencing a torturous vision of his soulmate engaged in a hayloft tryst, the musician is brought one measure closer to his own personal climax.

What's most surprising about this tragic story is that it's also extremely funny, with several scenes delivering the cheesy appeal of a "scandal movie" from the '50s. This probably isn't unintentional. The dialogue between Elias and Elsbeth during their surreptitious carriage ride seems more enjoyably cliché'd than bad writing or poor translation would allow. (He: "Your face is hot." She: "I'm thirsty.") And when Vilsmaier crosscuts between the aforementioned hayloft encounter and Elias furiously banging out his latest church hymn, the overemphatic style suggests a certain bad-taste pun -- that the musician has been preoccupied with his own organ. Still, the film's real pleasure isn't its humor so much as its overall excess, the tone it projects of several major chords being struck at once.