Toronto: Day 8

When you're at a film festival and you're pounding five or six movies a day, you can get a little burned out waiting for the magic to happen -- for a film to reach out and grab you with the sheer force of its originality.

It finally happened to me today with "The Fall," a captivating fantasy-drama that suggests "The Princess Bride" dyed several shades darker. Directed by Tarsem Singh, a former video director (REM's "Losing My Religion") who goes by his first name professionally, it's the very odd tale of a 5-year-old Romanian immigrant girl (Catinca Untaru) who meets a paralyzed and suicidal Hollywood matinee idol (Lee Pace) in a Los Angeles hospital during the earliest days of silent-era moviemaking. He tells her a saga of epic adventure, concerning five stalwart heroes seeking revenge against the dread Governor Odious, and we see this narrative-within-a-narrative through the little girl's febrile imagination.

And what an imagination: "The Fall" is about the power of storytelling (and about its limits, too) and as visualized by Tarsem and cinematographer Colin Watkinson, it's one jaw-dropping storybook image after another. The locations extended across 20-some countries, and when you see something that looks like the Taj Mahal in the background, by God, it's the Taj Mahal. There are shots here that can take your breath away -- like a vision of enemy soldiers crisscrossing stone steps that's worthy of M.C. Escher -- but the film as a whole is rooted in wonder and loss, and the acting by Untaru constitutes one of the most natural, least actressy kiddie performances I've ever seen.

The thing ain't perfect: It's incrdasingly overripe and it turns nasty in ways it's not equipped to handle in the home stretch (unlike Guillermo del Toro's similar "Pan's Labyrinth," another festival stand-out). But it has the courage of its narrative daring, and I can say that about few of the films here.

No U.S. release set, but keep an eye out for it.