When I first heard about Welcome to Me, a movie from director Shira Piven (Fully Loaded) that defies characterization, I talked with a friend about star Kristen Wiig. We adore her (who doesn’t?) and immediately agreed on her immense dramatic potential (“Wiig seems destined for an Oscar nom someday,” were my friend’s exact words). She banks on it in Welcome to Me, a bizarre, uncomfortable and fearless film about mental illness and our society’s mental illness: a desire to be famous, to be televised, a symptom of reality TV.

Wiig is Alice Krieg, a mentally unstable, closeted woman diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. She’s kept her TV on nonstop for 10 years and every morning, watches a VHS tape of Oprah, reciting Oprah’s touching monologue about everyone’s “True Calling” by heart. Alice is surrounded by a sea of labeled Oprah VHS tapes in a living room seemingly removed from time.

Afterwards, Alice makes a trip to a mini mart, where the owner has her Oprah magazine and lottery ticket waiting. The thing is, this time, she wins. Alice wins 86 million dollars.

Off her meds against Dr. Moffat’s (Tim Robbins) wishes, Alice moves into a casino hotel “indefinitely,” and tackles her destiny: writing a $15 million check to Rich (James Marsden) and Gabe (Wes Bentley) of Palm Desert studios to guarantee her 100 two hour episodes of her own talk show. It’s clearly an incredibly bad idea, their production company is on fumes and Rich is happy to take her money, and let her do whatever she wants.

The result is “Welcome to Me,” a talk show all about Alice (“like Oprah, with a swan boat”), a “narrative infomercial” with segments like “Smelling Things Before They Happen” and rampant reenactments reliving uncomfortable moments from Alice’s past.

This sounds insane, and it is, but Welcome to Me never devolves into farce or pure absurdity. It’s not treated as a comedy, and Alice always feels like a real character. This is a drama with real people, and it’s no less hilarious for it (I’d argue that it’s more hilarious for it).

One might worry that she is too Kristen Wiig, but she’s not: she’s wonderfully deadpan and peak Kristen Wiig, never coming close to turning a complicated character into caricature, which would’ve been the easy way out.

The entire cast commits to this bizarre world, and when that cast includes Kristen Wiig, Wes Bentley, James Marsden, Tim Robbins, Joan Cusack, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Linda Cardellini and Alan Tudyk, you know you’ve encountered a special movie.

The movie has come onto people’s radars for Wiig’s much-publicized nude casino scene. A movie as complex and interesting as this doesn’t deserve to be boiled down to just that, but it serves to highlight what a fearless performance this is by Wiig, and a fearless movie in general. For whatever the reason, I’m glad it’ll get more people to watch this movie, even though I suspect people expecting, say Bridesmaids, will walk away bewildered.

The film toes the line of scary and funny throughout, with a unique pacing that mirrors Alice’s instability, and because of that, it’s impossible to predict. That’s something to cherish.

WELCOME TO ME arrives in select theaters May 1st and nationwide May 8th.

In the 1970’s, oil was discovered in the North Sea off the shore of Norway. It was a potential goldmine…but the oil was in such deep waters that it required state of the art technology for divers to even survive being down there. The Americans were, of course, happy to help lay the pipeline (ka-ching).

Erik Skjoldbjaerg, the Norwegian director responsible for Insomnia and Prozac Nation, splices a political thriller conceit into this timeline, and the result is Pioneer, a gripping, uncomfortable ride that never stops escalating. Most American audiences know nothing about Norway before or after the oil boom that made them the world’s richest country, and Pioneer is a fictionalized retelling of the tale, with deep sea divers as unfortunate collateral damage, thanks to the whims of oil-starved businessmen on either side.

Petter (Aksel Hennie) and Knut (Andre Eriksen) are brothers, and two thirds of the Norwegian diving team (along with Jorgen) set to test the new tech and Ronald’s (Cold Case’s Jonathan LaPaglia) gas that will help them survive in unheard of depths. The film opens with a trippy, claustrophobic verification test, with the Norwegians and brusque American douche cliché Mike (Interstellar and The Hunger Games’ Wes Bentley), getting them used to the immense pressure that accompanies a depth of 500 meters. While they “pass” the test, Jorgen complains of sickness, and the trio hallucinate an albatross, which is never a happy literary metaphor.

Afterwards, on the eve of the first real test dive in open sea, Knut tells Petter that it’s his last dive; he wants to spend more time with his wife and son, and can only do that as a diving supervisor. Knut should know not to say things like that, but then again, he presumably doesn’t know he’s in a movie.

Suffice to say, a tragic accident occurs underwater, and the rest of the proceedings attempt to uncover the mystery. At first, it seems pretty clear that Petter, suffering from blackouts, is at fault and in denial, refusing to be culpable, but there’s a new wrinkle in each successive scene, that makes things as fuzzy as a human brain 320 meters below sea level.

The open sea and deep water is terrifying to me, one of many reasons why I can never be Pacey. And while Skjoldbjaerg captures that fear, he taps into something more technical, yet even more nefarious: the pressurization of the human body and the requisite decompression sickness. Petter is Dustin Hoffman in All the President’s Men if Hoffman was hallucinating, blacking out, bald, possibly involved in his own investigation and plucked in and out of deep waters like the jerkwad kid at a much more treacherous dunk tank. In other words, I have no idea how Petter can walk upright, let alone do any of the things required of him here.

The oil operation is a game changer for all parties involved, with massive money promised if the pipeline can be constructed and the fossil fuel brought ashore. This is the effective backdrop for dozens of sinister variables. The Norwegians unfortunately need the Americans, because only the U.S. scientists have configured a gas that allows “safe” deep diving. What will the Norwegians do to get the gas? What will the Americans, represented by the grizzled Stephen Lang‘s Ferris, do to keep their upper hand and the money that comes with forced cooperation? Petter finds himself in deeper $#*! than even in water, as the only one who might stumble upon the truth. The way Pioneer unravels, Petter (and the audience) never really know the truth, but it’s undoubtedly an intriguing excursion into the corrupt politics of oil. The plot points are nothing new to the thriller genre (a missing tape! A limping murderer! Cover ups! Stealing manila file folders!), but the unique setting transcends the familiar trappings, thanks to such queasy clever scenes like air pressurization-as-horrifying-interrogation-technique. Besides, it’s always fun to jump back into the 1970’s political thriller sub-genre.

Pioneer will be available on iTunes/OnDemand and open in NY and LA this Friday, December 5. Pioneer will expand to additional theaters December 12.