Tideland is a 2005 fantasy film co-written and directed by Terry Gilliam, following the story of Jeliza-Rose (Jodelle Ferland), a young child who struggles to make sense of life in isolation as she lives with an eccentric adult brother and sister in rural Texas after the death of her drug-addicted, abusive parents.

Tideland centers on an abandoned child, Jeliza-Rose, and her solitary adventures during one summer in rural Texas while staying at a rundown farmhouse called What Rocks, and focuses on the increasingly dark, imaginative fantasy life the girl creates with the aid of dismembered Barbie doll heads that she often wears on her fingertips.

With names such as Mystique, Sateen Lips, Baby Blonde and Glitter Gal, the doll heads not only engage in long conversations with Jeliza-Rose, reflecting different aspects of the girl's psyche, but also act as her companions while she explores the barren Texas landscape.

For much of the rest of the film, Noah's corpse remains seated upright in a living room chair with sunglasses covering his eyes.

As her father slowly begins to decompose, Jeliza-Rose doesn't readily acknowledge his death because she has grown accustomed to him being unconscious for long periods.

During Jeliza-Rose's wanderings, she eventually encounters and befriends her neighbors, a mentally impaired young man called Dickens and his older sister Dell who is blind in one eye from a bee sting.

The Monster Shark is, in reality, the nightly passenger train that travels past the farmhouse where Jeliza-Rose and her dead father reside.

Wandering about the wreckage, and among the confusion of injured travelers, Jeliza-Rose is discovered by a woman who survived, and she assumes the little girl is also a victim of the train wreck.

Jennifer Tilly, who played Jeliza-Rose's morbidly obese, abusive mother, wore excess padding to make herself appear overweight, but for the most part the chosen cast merely relied on makeup and behavioural mannerisms to accentuate their characters.

Production designer Jasna Stefanovic, who worked on most of the aesthetics and sets for Tideland, took heavy inspiration from Andrew Wyeth paintings and Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

[8] In response to the controversy surrounding the film's FIPRESCI win at San Sebastian, jurist Sergi Sanchez wrote: "Gilliam's was the only one that dared to propose a risky and radical image, without any concessions, on a specific matter: madness as the only way of escaping in the face of a hostile environment.

In the subsequent review of the DVD release, Gleiberman's fellow Entertainment Weekly critic Clark Collis gave the film a "B"[19] and stated: "Terry Gilliam's grim fairy tale is another fantastic(al) showcase for his visual talents.

"[22] The Chicago Tribune critic Michael O'Sullivan,[23] however, praised the film,[24] further stating that "... it's crazy, dangerous and sometimes gorgeous ...",[25] and Harry Knowles of Ain't It Cool News wrote, "Tideland, for me, is a masterpiece", a blurb featured on the DVD release.

Atkinson posits that a historical perspective has made Kümel's previously scorned film a more viable creation when far removed from the cultural context in which it was first released.

He goes on to argue that Tideland could be the 21st century counterpart to Malpertuis, suggesting that Gilliam's film "is a snark-hunted freak just waiting for its historical moment, decades from now, when someone makes a case for it as a neglected masterpiece.