Harmony Korine's latest offering, Mister Lonely, released on 14 March, is another dark portrayal of the marginalised, who are lost in the tattered fringes of society. We thought we'd give HK the Don't Panic stress test in an attempt to discover why his films are so consistently dark.

Anyone who has ever seen a Hamony Korine film will know that his subject matter is often less than chipper. Start as you mean to go on I suppose. Write a film about teenagers with Aids (Kids). For those who have missed his subsequent offerings, it doesn’t get much lighter. To grossly oversimplify everything:

Gummo: a bunch of inbreds and dwarves running around a small town in Ohio in bunny ears killing dogs and beating each other with chairs.

Ken Park: A Larry Clark film based on a script Korine had written several years earlier about underage kids having sex with each other.

Julien Donkey-Boy: a Dogme-esque film following the life of a paranoid schizophrenic with gold teeth who smashes kids' heads open with rocks and runs around wearing bras and panties.

And then there is Harmony’s most recent offering. Mister Lonely, starring Samantha Morton and Diego Luno of Y Tu Mamá También fame, is a film about a bunch celebrity impersonators who isolate themselves in a castle-commune in the Scottish Highlands.

The film is in many ways a love story and although much more sanguine than many of his previous offerings, I still came out of Mister Lonely feeling irrevocably bleak. It’s a strange feeling to know that you have enjoyed a film despite or perhaps because of the gloomy feelings it triggered in you.

Harmony is clearly a creatively distortive force in cinema, both as a writer and a director. Few film makers can mess around with our ideas of narrative so effectively or unnerve viewers so entirely. And yet clearly there is something wrong with the man! When I asked him where his inspiration came for Mister Lonely he said (without hesitation):

“I was travelling in Iceland, looking for locations, when I came across a farmhouse. I knocked on the door and a woman wearing no clothes answered. She was holding a muffin and she was crying – make-up dripping into her eyes.

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