Trying to make sense of the concept behind Rubber Johnny is like trying to decipher Chris Cunningham's psyche: good luck, because you're not going to unearth many concrete answers.

But it's exactly this mystique and elusiveness of the British director and the resultant absurdity of his images that make his work so appealing - if disturbing.

Rubber Johnny is Cunningham's hotly anticipated short film. Set to Aphex Twin's track "Afx237 V7", and an extension of his collaboration with Aphex on his 2001 album Drukqs, the film was released on May 23 as a DVD and book of companion images, sketches and photos by Warp Films.

It continues the story of a shape-shifting, mutant teenager with violent tendencies who's left to amuse himself in the dark recesses of his basement confinement. His only companions are a neurotic and skittish dog and his raging imagination.

Shot on DV in night vision, Cunningham himself appears as the contorted central character who seems placid and broken when his loveless parents peer on him, but is prone to intense and grotesque freakouts in isolation.

The visuals themselves are startling in their unnaturalness. Well-executed prosthetics and Cunningham's sickly and inhuman movements are elevated by frantic edits and Aphex's driving track.

For Cunningham - who is repped by RSA and is known for his dark and innovative videos for Aphex Twin, Squarepusher and Björk - the primary objective of the six-minute film was to "try and push the sychronization of my work to the limit before doing a feature." Most of the editing and compiling of the film was done by Cunningham himself, with additional post support from London's Golden Square Post.

"I wanted to see how fast you can go before it becomes nonsensical, a mess," he said in a press statement. "It was incredibly difficult to edit this video and find that line where it seems breakneck but still flows and makes sense as a sequence. It involved a lot of experimentation."

While the project has been in gestation for years, production on Rubber Johnny ran roughly from September 2004 to March of this year. A known perfectionist, Cunningham is said to have worked on over 10,000 individual frames.

Rubber Johnny> http://www.rubberjohnny.tv
Warp Films> http://www.warpfilms.com
Golden Square Post> http://www.goldensq.com