This is as unpredictable film as you will find for a long time. It means that you are not quite sure of whether you are enjoying it or not because you don’t recognise too many signposts along the way to indicate what the film is doing or where it is going.

Which, of course, is all to the good – and means that you have to give some more thought to what you have seen than what you might normally do.

One signpost, however, is that the film is based on a novel by Patrick McCabe who has co-written the screenplay. His Butcher Boy took us into some weird realms: both ordinary life in a village but also violence and apparitions of the Virgin Mary. In Ireland. That’s another signpost. This is an Irish story with a sense of the fantastic, the offbeat comedy and a touch of blarney, the Catholic church and moral teaching and sex.

But the main signpost is that the film has been co-written and directed by Neil Jordan. For over twenty years, Jordan has offered many very different portraits of Irish life (Angel, The Miracle, Butcher Boy) as well as delving into the world of fantasy and mythologies (Company of Wolves, Interview with the Vampire, In Dreams). His versatility can be seen from the fact that he made Michael Collins, Mona Lisa, The End of the Affair. But, reviewers will point to his Oscar-winning (for screenplay) The Crying Game for a reference here with its story of a transvestite.

First of all, the film is comic in tone. The hero (who might preferred to be referred to as heroine) narrates the story in a broguishly roguish kind of way. Then there are the two robins who feature early in the film, pecking into the tops of milk bottles and making chirpy comments along the way (with sub-titles!!). The narrative is also split up into almost forty mini-chapters with humorous and ironic titles coming up on screen.

This the story of Patrick, abandoned by his mother at the presbytery door in 1956, who is fostered by a demanding mother, finds that he prefers dressing and acting like a girl and takes the name Kitten, and embarks on the life of a transvestite in London in the 1970s. That plot outline should be enough to raise curiosity.

But, there is so much more than that. Not only is it a humane story of a very confused young man who feels alienated from family and community, it moves into the area of Irish troubles and terrorism and brutal police interrogations.

When a policeman takes an interest in Kitten, he helps her/him to move into a Soho prostitute co-op where he appears in peep-show booths – which offers a telling sequence where, in a parallel to the confessional, his father tells him how to find his mother. The film ends with strong feeling but avoiding sentimentality.

Cameos from Brendan Gleeson, Ian Hart and Stephen Rea and the earnest presence of Liam Neeson as the parish priest. But it is Cillian Murphy (Girl With a Pearl Earring, Red Eye, Batman Begins) who sustains the film with a fully committed performance as Patrick.

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