[1] This black comedy takes places in the 1960s, in a surreal Dutch new town consisting of only a single street.

It is a darkly amusing satire of bourgeois life and its repressions, pursuit of fantasies through a Freudian forest are all executed with visual and dramatic flair.

When Thomas' mother Martha is drawn into sainthood and changes their home into a shrine this frustrates his father the local butcher, Jacob and he finds it difficult to manage it all with his sexual needs.

It is there that he meets Agnes, a half-naked woman who lives in the forest and hides at the bottom of a pond and shows him how to breathe underwater by sucking on a stem.

He is encouraged in this escapism by Simon, the postman who reads all the mail and knows all of the bizarre and intimate secrets of the eccentric inhabitants of the town.

Meanwhile, Martha's fasting has rendered her bedridden and the villagers pray at her window believing her to be a saint rather than a depressed woman.