Van Dormael has crafted a saga that, even at two-plus hours, is endlessly, enormously watchable.

van Dormael’s vivid visual sense and genuine curiosity about the nature of love and life, time and death, make it well worth surrendering to his imagination for a while.

Van Dormael's intriguing script is more than matched in his flamboyant direction of this 2-hour-plus tale, heroically edited by Matyas Veress and Susan Shipton into a fluid, generally understandable narrative.

Writer-director Jaco Van Dormael (“Toto the Hero”) spins flashbacks and time-lapse photography, stunning montages, whirling, circling cameras and stunning underwater, deep space and Martian landscape photography into a film that is as intentionally opaque as it is overlong.

As philosophy, Mr. Nobody seems sillier than it is profound. But in a parallel reality, more movies would have this degree of insane ambition.