An alternative timeline: the Cold War grows so heated that, in 2004, an atomic bomb strikes the desert of Soviet Kazakhstan. Yet one thing remains unchanged even here – no one gets paid for practising journalism. The hipster cultural magnate Dino Davis invites the young enthusiast Sonja to join him on a journalistic expedition to a Soviet-American military base overseeing Kazakhstan’s radioactive zone. It is a mythical place said to be inhabited by phantasmagorical creatures, and Sonja yearns to secure her story – hopefully a sensation. All would be well (yes, the Soviet Union never collapsed) if it weren’t at once terrifying and absurdly hilarious.

A surreal fantasy take on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), with Cold War and media industry overtones fizzing through it like an effervescent vitamin C tablet. Thrilling audiences at the Toronto International Film Festival, the Swedish directing duo Kågerman (once employed at Vice) and Lilja offer a savvy cinema of excess, carrying the familiar hallucinatory qualities of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), albeit leading into a different desert. By adapting the 1957 novel The Egghead Republic by the German author Arno Schmidt, which deals with a post-nuclear world and partisan journalism, they usher us into the realm of a countercultural impresario. After all, hasn’t the digital age taught us that what we want the most is to retreat into some radioactive desert and listen to our own thoughts endlessly echo through loudspeakers? Sounds about right, doesn’t it?