'They flooded a bunch of towns when they dammed the river. That's why they call this Lost River," says Rat (Saoirse Ronan), a character in actor Ryan Gosling's directorial debut, "Lost River."
"As soon as the last town was drowned, an evil spell was cast on Lost River," she continues. "Everything going on around here, it has to be for some reason."
Good luck figuring out what that is, though, as Gosling's modern-day fairy tale fails to connect on any level except the aesthetic. There's no kind of bad quite like bad surrealism, and Gosling flushes twice to make sure he goes all the way down.