Terry Gilliam has provided cinema with some truly striking images. Anyone who’s seen Time Bandits, Brazil, and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen will have been treated to a phantasmagoria of memorable sequences. But then there’s the Gilliam who brought us The Fisher King and its fascination with Jungian imagery, something that’s come to a head in his new film, The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus.

As you’d expect, the film is a visual treat at times, but a mightily laboured one, co-scripted by Gilliam himself. Ultimately it’s about Gilliam himself, and his conviction that he’s creating magic for a world that wants hamburgers instead. Dr Parnassus is the elderly figure standing in for Gilliam, a bearded man who may be wise or may simply have lost it. That’s what we’re led to think at first anyway, before the Imaginarium is revealed in all its glory — a fantastic opportunity for transformation that can lead people to a very personal kind of heaven or hell.

Conceptually it’s interesting enough, but there’s something tired-looking about Gilliam’s trademark version of spectacle in a world where Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman are peddling equally unlikely redefinitions of reality. Besides, they’re inhabiting this territory with something to say, and it’s really not at all clear that Gilliam has any substance to his work at this point.

Imaginarium is like watching Gilliam undergo a therapy session which he’s managed to persuade someone else to foot the bill for. But I really don’t see why I should have to suffer for Gilliam’s art. And that’s exactly what I did when there was some toe-curling stuff between Dr P and his daughter — is she 12 or is she 16? Same again when Tom Waits turns up as the devil. It’s a pretty credible performance, Tom getting maximum points for using his distinctive voice to good effect.

Somehow it all seems pointless. When everything is so massively Symbolic, then nothing has significance. Amid all the tiresomely surreal imagery, Gilliam has forgotten what a story is, intent as he is on bringing to life the film’s central image, that of Dr P’s magical mirror.

Mirrors only ever show who’s looking into them versions of themselves. Stare into them too long and the effect can be pretty psychedelic without actually meaning anything. And that’s what we’re presented with here, as Gilliam rolls out one startling image after another. With Gilliam himself cripplingly self-conscious about the yarn he’s telling, there’s no room for the true richness that comes when a creator loses themselves in a story.

What does Gilliam see in the mirror? A crazed dandy trying to bring magic into a world that doesn’t deserve it. Which makes you wonder how he ever gets a film made at all, if that’s what he thinks of his audience.

Contrast the riches of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Donnie Darko, or Oldboy with this overdecorated bauble, and it’s clear that Gilliam is treading water at a time when other filmmakers are surging ahead. Whether he’s got it in him to renew his focus, or prefers to examine himself from yet more angles in his doubtless baroque shaving mirror, is a matter for Gilliam to decide.