Like all great movies, Patrick Boivin's Radio works on multiple levels. Ostensibly the story of a hospital orderly who suffers from schizophrenia, the film broadens its scope to show the way the 24-hour news media insinuates itself into our lives, spreading fear and, in this case, causing despair.

Tom is a white-faced twentysomething with stringy black hair who wouldn't look out of place in one of Tim Burton's modern fairy tales. He buys a radio to listen to on the graveyard shift, which gets stuck on a gloomy newscast about the avian flu outbreak. One of the keys to Radio is the voice work of Ian Finlay. Just as it drives Tom to madness, that voice gets inside our heads too. It's among the most striking voiceovers in recent movies, right up there with The Cement Garden and Little Children.

The film is a masterpiece of slowly gnawing fear and paranoia, while also displaying the director's patented dark humor. The camerawork is dynamic throughout, becoming almost a character in itself. The final scenes of Tom alone in the woods, shooting at birds and running from the police, are wonderfully strange and moving. Boivin shows us how the culture of fear has its casualties, and how none of us are immune.