The opening sequence sets the tone for Guy X. An army transport plane skims a makeshift landing strip with a screech of rubber on gravel. Before the plane has even halted, a hatch opens and unseen hands shove a young man and his kitbag unceremoniously onto the dirt runway. Then the plane takes off, leaving Private Rudy Spruance (Jason Biggs) marooned at an isolated US army outpost in Greenland. Which wouldn’t be so bad except Rudy was meant to have been posted to Hawaii. Now those fellow soldiers who aren’t mocking his mosquito bites are insisting on calling him by the wrong name and Rudy is having trouble convincing anyone that they have got the wrong guy. It’s the beginning of a surreal, unpredictable journey to the far side of paranoia for both Rudy and the audience of an intriguing but uneven movie.

It’s the second feature for the British director Saul Metzstein, an ambitious leap which, while it doesn’t entirely pay off, showcases some of Metzstein’s strengths — an offbeat sense of humour and a real talent for the kind of running joke that gets under your skin and pesters you into laughing yourself silly.

Guy X is set in 1979. There’s a touch of MASH about the scenario, and in the bleak, nihilistic humour particular to people forced to live at the ends of the earth. What’s most effective is the atmosphere of muted psychosis that builds up, the fallout from isolation, 23 hours of darkness per day and a menu that seems to be limited to increasingly unappetising recipes involving local wildlife. Even Rudy’s closest friends are either swivel-eyed and erratic or babbling maniacs for at least part of the film.

Less successful is the romantic subplot — Biggs and his costar Natascha McElhone are fine independently but their relationship just doesn’t catch fire. Plus McElhone is too poised and self-possessed to convince in the role of a Sergeant relegated to a scrap heap army of reject soldiers.

Not content with black comedy and a romantic subplot, the film morphs halfway through into a paranoid conspiracy thriller, when Rudy inadvertently stumbles upon the dark secret that the army base is meant to be guarding. The disparate strands never quite mesh, yet the film is pleasingly oddball and unconventional.

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