Finding the connective tissue between one incident and the next can be its own form of madness, yet the film is transfixing, too, provided viewers yield to it a little.

Dillinger is one of those artful endurance tests that views conventional storytelling as a sell-out. Yet the movie's also playful, droll, and unexpectedly wise within its rigorous framework.

Like an Ionesco one-act, the movie is purposely backloaded, rolling along to no apparent purpose and then climaxing with an absurd act of violence that casts a harsh white glare on the bourgeois self-indulgence that preceded it.

A bizarre, dark fantasy.