Carrying out my critical duty, here's what I think I figured out: Goodbye 20th Century has God (not the fluffy, New Agey God that we tend to hear about today, but rather the chilly and vengeful Old Testament God, who's quoted in an epigraph) descending to earth on the eve of the next 100-year calendar period, snuffing out most of human life as we know it and instructing one person to build a boat that can weather the coming storm -- and to learn how to swim. He's dressed as Santa Claus.

That's the second half of the film. The first half takes place post-apocalypse (yes, it's one of those non-linear narratives), and is even more obscure, but the gist is that, while he was ending the world, God left instructions for what's left of the human race. One immortal survivor is instructed that only when he sleeps with his sister will he be able to die in peace. My guess is that the children of this incestuous fling will eventually repopulate the earth, but what do I know? The film is shot in a way that clearly suggests all this sleep-with-your-sister business is an Ocurrence at Owl Creek Bridge-style hallucination, so all bets are probably off anyway.

Despite the obvious religious connotations (we actually see the wrecked ark in the first scenes of the film, giving us clues where everything is headed), I can't make any further sense out of Goodbye, 20th Century (and I freely admit that I could be completely wrong about all that God stuff above). The film's mood is perched somewhere between the introspective tableaux of a Tarkovsky film and the mania of a Jeunet & Caro fantasia. It's occasionally visually exciting, and writer/directors Aleksandar Popovski and Darko Mitrevski are undeniably talented (one particularly vertiginous shot involves a toilet and may be a homage to Trainspotting), but the level of obscurity they're operating at is off-putting. I liked a couple of the more flamboyant touches, and if you figure this is their calling card to the film industry, it may be worthwhile keeping an eye out in case these guys take on an equally ambitious but more coherent project next time around.