Review: ‘Home Minister’ deals oddly with affairs of the heart

The recent rise of digital cinema has made it possible for just about anyone anywhere in the world to make something that can aspire to call itself a movie. Looking at “Home Minister” through that lens, it’s easy to think of the project as a home-made, one-man-band amateur movie created with an odd naivete.

So it’s a little bit disappointing when it turns out to have been crafted by people active in the Tamil film industry of southern India known as Kollywood, credited to a writer-director known as “P. Rajamanickam.”

The film stars actor Venu Arvind -- he is the only character who appears on screen, spending all his time alone -- as a supposedly family-oriented government official attending an international peace conference who is informed via text that his Australian mistress has been kidnapped.

PHOTOS: Hollywood backlot moments

As he drives to meet the kidnappers, he is spoken to by God, who engages him in a long, meandering conversation on the historical origins of the rise of terrorism, the importance of population control and other topics circling the quality of modern life.

God speaks with a British-accent, an almost computer-inflected formality -- “It was very nice talking to you,” God says at the end -- which plays as weird counterpoint to Arvind’s own stilted delivery.

Earnestly musing on the big questions, there is likely nothing else quite like “Home Minister,” a self-published philosophical tract transposed into a movie that defies most all conventional notions of good or bad. It’s something more akin to hypnotically terrible.

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“Home Minister.” No MPAA rating. Running time: 1 hour, 22 minutes. At Laemmle’s Playhouse 7, Pasadena.