Writer-director Matthew Rankin’s first feature is a look back at Canadian history through a psychedelic and psychosexual lens. Centering on a young Mackenzie King (Dan Beirne), who would go on to become the longest-serving prime minister in Canadian history, the film is adapted from King’s private diary, as if the events were rearranged into an epic fever dream.

In the year 1899, King is in his early 20s, all pasty white and stuck-up. His domineering mother (played by Louis Negan in drag) has designs for him to become the greatest prime minister Canada has ever had. So singularly focused on becoming PM, King hardly has a life at all (evidenced in that he doesn’t know what music is and in his giving a child dying of tuberculosis a campaign ribbon as a gift). Mother, who has been bedridden for 25 years with a migraine, clearly has a mental illness, and some of the first laughs are from the actors playing up the oedipal relationship. Another of Mother’s prophecies is that King will marry Ruby (Catherine St-Laurent), the daughter of the war-mongering governor-general, Lord Muto (Seán Cullen).

King runs for prime minister against several young men in the “Leadership Skills Testing.” Presided by the Justice Richardson (Trevor Anderson, camping it up), the tests are demonstrations of the candidates’ masculinity and Canadianness. Five minutes of constant Canadian and dick jokes, this is easily the funniest scene. Kings loses to the more charismatic Bert Harper (Mikhaïl Ahooja), who goes on to fight in the Boer War and becomes engaged to Ruby, naturally.

The Twentieth Century could be seen as a queer reading of Mackenzie King as well as early 20th-century Canada. King was a lifelong bachelor, and some historians have speculated that he was a closeted homosexual. The film sidesteps his suspected romantic relationship with Bert Harper and instead gives him a shoe fetish that, if discovered, would threaten his aspirations. In keeping with the film’s serving as a viewfinder into King’s subconscious, the boot fetish represents his repressed sexual urges, whatever those may have been. But also, it’s just funny to watch an actor pretend to be masturbate while sniffing a shoe.

The big question is whether this movie will make sense to those who are not knowledgeable of Canadian history (like this reviewer). Certainly, there are moments where the jokes will land better for history buffs. Same goes for the self-deprecating humor, as in the portrayal of Winnipeg as a hellish Sodom and Gomorrah or the film’s idea of the traditional Toronto wedding: a blindfolded bride smells her way across an ice flow to a maple tree sapling planted by the groom.

It is all filmed on a set, with minimalistic designs reminiscent of German expressionism and, more recently, the works of Lars von Trier and Canada’s own Guy Maddin. The film’s absurd psychosexual humor, which seems to always come hand-in-hand with obligatory grotesquery (such as a cactus spewing ejaculate), recalls the early work of Peter Jackson, especially Meet the Feebles. Rankin’s film utilizes a 4:3 aspect ratio and scratchy celluloid to give it a 1920s Russian propaganda look. Fans of experimental film as well as history buffs who wouldn’t mind a raunchy send-up of actual history will want to check this film out.

The fictional Mackenzie King’s motto is repeated several times: “As sure as a winter’s day in springtime.” Rankin’s script paraphrases this kind of repressed person’s lack of irony in at least a dozen more ways; the theme of disappointment, expressed through political inaction and sexual repression. (One sexually liberated character states, “Canada is just one failed orgasm after another.”) For instance, the buttoned-up young men competing in the Leadership Skills Testing recite the “Canadian National Sentiment,” which goes: “Canadians, in happy days, as in sad, disappointed shall you be. Always and forever more, may the disappointment keep us safe from foolish aspirations and unreasonable longing.” With this motto, Rankin seems to be saying, the only thing one can depend on in life is dissatisfaction.