These aren’t the bedtime stories your parents told you: if they were, you might still be lying awake. The new film from the Italian director Matteo Garrone stands apart from the social-realist fables of present-day Naples – the dizzying crime collage Gomorrah and the twinkling instant-fame satire Reality – that marked him out over the last few years as a serious talent. But then Tale of Tales stands apart from almost everything: there’s a reasonable chance it will be the strangest experience you’ll have in the cinema all year. Garrone’s film – his first in English – is a triptych of fables drawn from the Pentamerone, a 17th-century book of Neapolitan folk stories compiled by the Italian poet Giambattista Basile. Watching it often feels, in the best possible way, like wading through a pond of dream soup. Working with three co-writers, including his regular collaborators Ugo Chiti and Massimo Gaudioso, Garrone has adapted three stories from Basile’s collection: The Enchanted Doe, The Flea and The Flayed Old Lady. They’re retold here with a kind of mad-eyed fidelity, intent on wringing every last sweat-droplet of transgression and ambiguity from the original work. All three tales are lightly connected, and each one centres on a woman at a pivotal point in her neatly prescribed fairy-tale life. The first stars Salma Hayek as the Queen of Longtrellis, who conceives an heir after eating the heart of a sea-dragon retrieved by her husband, the King (John C. Reilly). But the spell, passed on to her by a wandering soothsayer (Franco Pistoni), also causes a virginal kitchen hand to fall pregnant – and the two women’s matching sons, played by identical twin brothers Christian and Jonah Lees, carry out a Prince-and-the-Pauper ruse against the Queen. Elsewhere, the King of Highhills (Toby Jones) allows his attention to wander from his accomplished daughter Violet (Bebe Cave) to a flea, which lands on his arm during one of her recitals. The scene is a masterpiece of clowning, with Jones’s every reaction to the (of course invisible) jumping insect calibrated to the nearest millimetre for maximum comic effect.  Feeding the creature on his own blood, and later chunks of meat, it swells to the size of a sow – while his dwindling interest in his own daughter’s wellbeing causes trouble when the time comes to find her a husband. It’s the kind of film you’ve spent the 10 years wishing Terry Gilliam and Tim Burton would make Jones is on peak form here, but his 19-year-old co-star Cave is a serious match for him, and gives the kind of textured, keenly felt performance – fiery pathos tempered with a deft comic touch – that makes you want to see her cast in everything immediately. Meanwhile, in the kingdom of Strongcliff, a pustulent crone played by Hayley Carmichael and, later, Stacy Martin, tricks her way into the bedchamber of her sex-mad monarch with the help of her equally conniving and hideous sister (Shirley Henderson). The king, enthusiastically played by Vincent Cassel, is horrified and defenestrates her – but fate isn’t finished with this gruesome twosome quite yet, and an enchantment intervenes. Each story is performed and staged with prankish wit and a palpable sexual charge. Sequences of shadow-spun horror rub up against moments of searing baroque beauty: there is something of the haunting, tableaux-like illustrations of Edmund Dulac and Gustave Doré in Garrone’s image-making. The use of creative casting and practical special effects – perhaps most memorably in the scene in which Hayek devours the heart like some obscene, overripe giant fruit – grounds even its most phantasmagorical flights of fancy in the sticky, fleshy moment. The result is something of a readymade cult item – equal parts Pasolini and Python, and the kind of film you’ve spent the past 10 years wishing Terry Gilliam and Tim Burton would make. Though these shaggy-dog stories hail from a bygone age, their tricks feel intoxicatingly new. Robbie Collin telegraph.co.uk