The landscape of cinema is littered with dramas centered around how the strengths of the inner human can overcome the weaknesses of their external frames. Most fail to convey the pain and emotion of the experience without sinking into melodrama and manipulation, winding up as fodder for a Lifetime Channel holiday movie marathon. Those films that can get past the heart-string pulling and still remain emotionally moving are extremely rare. Just as hard to come by are filmmakers willing to take chances on a project deemed unfilmable by approaching the film from a wholly new and original angle. Director Julian Schnabel (Basquiat, Before Night Falls) is not a typical director, and it's his unique viewpoint and way of approaching his material that makes his third film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a true masterpiece. It's a haunting, emotional experience that ranks with the best of the year. Like most truly excellent films, it's hard to fully capture its power in words. You simply have to experience it.

It's a testament to the combined work of the very talented people that made The Diving Bell and the Butterfly that it feels more like an experience than a traditional film. In Schnabel's "based-on-a-true" story, Mathieu Amalric plays Jean-Dominique Bauby, the editor of Elle Magazine in France. After a horrible stroke, Jean-Do developed "locked-in syndrome," where everything inside his head stayed intact, but his brain became completely unable to communicate with the rest of his body. He was left with only the movement of his left eye and its lid. Using his eyelid to blink once for yes and twice for no, and coming up with a blink system to communicate specific letters in the alphabet, Bauby wrote the book that has now been turned into Schnabel's film. It's an inherently heartbreaking and moving tale, but Schnabel, writer Ronald Harwood, and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski made a series of daring choices in adapting it that have turned it into one of the best films of the year.

The team behind The Diving Bell and the Butterfly have come as close as possible to replicating Bauby's experience with locked-in syndrome for the audience. For the first third of the film, Schnabel puts us inside Bauby's body, and Kaminski masterfully recreates a person coming to life. He turns his camera into an eye, complete with a fluttering lid and a limited perspective. For nearly twenty minutes, we stay inside the damaged frame of Bauby, only briefly seeing glimpses of the healthy young man in his memories and hearing a voice inside his head. We meet his wife, Celine (the luminous Emmanuelle Seigner), and the woman who would help draw Jean-Do out of his diving bell existence, Henriette Durand (the perfect Marie-Josee Croze). And we don't see what Jean-Do looks like following the stroke until he sees himself in a reflection as he's being wheeled down a hall.

At that point, Schnabel and Harwood loosen up their structure, and we start to see Jean-Do from other people's perspectives. Just as our hero breaks free from his self-pity and can start to imagine how others must view him, Schnabel and Harwood do the same thing for the audience. And then Diving Bell really takes off. Jean-Do realized that he had only two things left following his stroke - his imagination and his memory - and Diving Bell takes us on a wild trip through both, with some of the most amazing cinematography and unexpectedly emotional scenes in years.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is one of those rare films where the creators made so many unexpected decisions in the writing and filmmaking process, and, in the face of great odds, they all paid off. Telling the story in non-linear fashion; giving us Jean-Do's POV; ending where most people would begin; doing the film in French in the first place - they're all decisions that another team with the same material might not have made, and The Diving Bell wouldn't have been half as affecting. They've taken an experience we can never understand and done the best job possible at conveying the emotion and the internal struggle associated with it. Like they could have in no other medium, they've put us inside the journey of the mind through pain, pity, memory, and imagination. It's unlike anything you've ever seen.