In a melange of humor both good and ill, the film "Nightwatching" revolves in the same way as the painting around a self-defacing tale of vile acts and accounts of innocence, raped of virtue. Meanwhile, lust and covetousness shield grief and confusion as the lofty ideals of an art form are challenged at the foundations of their authority.

As we are often reminded so sarcastically, history is written by the winners, and in whichever light they may choose. Obviously, the victor unavoidably picks out the heroic position. Even the ever-popularized anti-villain in new films like last week's release of Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight" fresh off the bat (pardon the pun), find themselves inevitably driven to cling to a relatable and amiable character to guide us through all the madness.

After all, if the hero isn't likeable, then it's hard to accept being saved by this warm hearted murderous skulker in the dark.

"Nightwatching" skulks just that little bit further though.

Crossing the proverbial line so ingrained in human instinct, it paints onwards into a unique darkness of its own, which from very first confrontation is nauseating and makes no sense at all.

Like Rembrant (Martin Freeman) at the start of the flick, the audience is flung naked, blind and shivering with drunken madness into the night.

He dreams that he is a "nightwatcher," living in an eternal darkness, where his life, his artwork, his colors are forever beyond him. "How would you describe the color red to a blind person?" he asks his servant.

With pedantic and tortured dark humor, Rembrant teases out our associations with feelings, starting with what he knows best; the visual. He talks of the yellow of a radiant sun, a bright warm husk of red, which turns cold and dark before the artist gradually sinks into a bitter mar of stories, which sticks up the ears and eyes like treacle.Immediately it is apparent that this whole thing makes no sense to the rational observer. What's more, the droll dialogue pitted with Rembrant's raucously quirky - though graceful - gales of dry humor makes the story itself a frustrating sequence of anticlimaxes and sickening outrages.

Disgusting at first; then, strange; then, unbearable; then... marvelous.

The plot is not hard to follow at all, as long as you give up paying attention to its complex unraveling. Rembrant has been commissioned to do a painting for a cocky crew of rapscallion musketeers from the Dutch civic militia. During the two years it takes him to complete his ambiguous work, the mischief of the priggish amateurs leads to the death of one of the subjects of the painting.

Giving up all faith in the movie would be an option, if it weren't for the strength of gravity of personality provided by Freeman's Rembrant. His honesty is his strength.

Meanwhile, Rembrant's wife and faithful companion births his son, Titus, before dying some months later. Trying to make sense of the mind-numbing banter of the 17th century pomp can be a struggle, as it oozes from the darkness surrounding the cold-blooded murder plot, shrouded in secrecy and dirty dealings.

Rembrant is renowned for little witty hints of the subject's character by distortions of the body and gestures or symbolism. "How do you decide what to paint?" enquires one of the young subjects, to which Rembrant honestly replies; whatever he feels like, if he's been drinking, if the person is a brutish villain of bad character, whether he was paid less than he thinks he deserves, whether he was in a good mood, and so forth.

If it hasn't already done so, the blatant honesty of Rembrant begins to get up your nose, with the militiamen asking just who this upstart thinks he is.

The truth is that Rembrant doesn't know. All he knows is that he can't see, "with a spark of light or two if your lucky," and he wants out. He does this by every cunning depravity at his hand. But inevitably never escapes the nightmare.

The theme of the whole movie indicates a courage and integrity on standing up to the audience and bellowing those cataclysmic tones "The horror! The horror!" worth more in an age of consumer-driven artlessness than any mainstream film's box office could ever pull off.