These days, everything’s pretty meta. Fourth-wall breaks and homages are everywhere. There’s an art to it, and meta films have the potential to elevate the genres they reside in. If you can figure out what the genre is. The Wheel of Heaven comes packaged in the form of a TV miniseries airing on public access TV, complete with advertisements and behind-the-scenes content interspersing installments of the “series.”

The production is realistically crunchy, bringing a nostalgic feeling to the experience. It’s also snappily paced, like watching a squirrel on cocaine run around, only with a higher chance of the viewer having an epileptic seizure. To my epileptic readers: maybe skip this one.

The film is introduced by audio from a podcast interview with director Joe Badon, who explains that his film was inspired by his deep faith in a local religious organization, the Church of Dino-retics. The Church believes that humans are the successors to the dinosaurs, and that for every dominant species on Earth, extinction is a natural part of the lifecycle. This cycle of dominance and extinction is the Wheel of Heaven.

After the podcast, a “short film” – The Blood of the Dinosaurs – airs as a prologue to the “series.” In a rather unsettling children’s show, we’re introduced to a version of Purity, the closest thing to a protagonist the film has. We also see an explanation of just how the cycle that is the Wheel of Heaven supposedly works, which involves a lot of interesting comparisons between sex and making a banana split ice cream sundae.

Once we get to the main part of the film, lead actress Kali Russell steals the show, portraying half the cast of a looping, twisting, turning plot that ends up tracking with a lot more consistency than you think it will at the outset. Russell plays the roles of, among others, an artist, a space captain, a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure protagonist, and the woman reading the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book. She also plays herself behind the scenes, butting heads with Badon over how to tell the story. Russell deserves all her flowers for showing such an incredible range, and she does a great job carrying the film.

The Wheel of Heaven is somewhere between a live-action episode of Welcome to Night Vale, a Doctor Bronner’s soap bottle, and an undergrad philosophy class on 4/20. And the more I think about it, the more I enjoyed it. It uses papercraft, miniatures, and stop-motion to create an aesthetic that’s delightfully low-budget and a world that’s mind-bogglingly huge. And the commercials for the skateboard attorney were hilarious.

The Wheel of Heaven won’t be for everyone. It’s pretty high-concept, low-budget stuff, and comes across pretty self-congratulatory at times, with a lot of stuff that’s just weird and random for the sake of being weird and random, but it’s also charming and provides a lot of food for thought. If you’re into disturbing and philosophical sci-fi realism, check it out!

And now, the weather.

7.5 out of 10