Last month, The Exorcist made the top of my queue. This week’s Horrors from Beyond the Netflix! pick is Being John Malkovich, a film that gives new meaning to walking in someone else’s shoes.

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments or suggest a Netflix instant streaming film that you’re curious about but would never, ever watch. (I’ll do that for you.)

Director Spike Jonze takes an unconventional profession—being a puppeteer—and, string by string, snips away all sense and logic. His bizarre 1999 movie Being John Malkovich follows a socially awkward man named Craig Schwartz (played by John Cusack), a puppeteer whose dreams of fame and recognition go unfulfilled as he struggles to earn a paycheck. Settling for a basic filing job to help support his wife Lotte (Cameron Diaz) and their animal roommates—a chimpanzee named Elijah and a parrot or two—Craig meets and begins lusting after the self-centered and highly ambitious Maxine Lund (Catherine Keener), a fellow employee. She makes it clear that she’s not interested, but once Craig finds a portal leading into actor John Malkovich’s head, she has a change of heart.

Eager to impress Maxine, the two begin cashing in on their new office discovery, and customers start lining up for a fifteen-minute peek into John Malkovich’s life. Everyone wants a taste, including Craig’s wife, who reacts euphorically to the experience. Being John Malkovich, it seems, has that effect on people. At the same time Lotte decides she’s transsexual, Maxine starts having sex with the popular actor—as long as Lotte’s the one pulling his strings. Wanting Maxine’s attention for himself, the odd new relationship between Lotte and Maxine enrages Craig, and each fights for a bigger chunk of Malkovich.

Eventually the truth comes out: Riding shotgun in John Malkovich’s body wasn’t a pleasure meant for them.

Jonze’s film is by no means boring; it’s a curious play on Shakespeare’s vision of the world as a stage, a comedy and tragedy rolled into one larger-than-life package. The characters, though, are anything but sympathetic. All of them commit despicable acts at one point or another, and there’s a good chance you’ll like them less and less as the movie goes on. Jonze arguably takes the joke too far at the expense of his audience, as well, because his film doesn’t end on a happy note.

Being John Malkovich is a clever film, but perhaps a little too clever for its own good.