On a modest budget, director Ben Wheatley gives us a retro sci-fi with much tongue-in-cheek paranoia, questioning of reality and proliferation of multiverses, and featuring comic-book dialogue that’s been re-recorded, giving the whole thing a sheen of dreamlike unreality. There’s also a lot of quirky lo-fi special effects work with Airfix models.

Bulk is a movie indebted to a mountain of pop culture references listed in Wheatley’s own handwriting in block capitals over the closing credits. Space: 1999 is one – it is good to see it there, and see it reflected in the preceding film – and with the monochrome cinematography, Dutch angles and looming closeups there’s a bit of John Frankenheimer and a little of Chris Petit. The film is massively self-indulgent, often funny, rescued from its not infrequent longueurs by its stars, those very likable performers Alexandra Maria Lara and Sam Riley, who are a real-life married couple.

Riley plays a tough-guy investigative journalist who is drugged and kidnapped by a snarling underling (Noah Taylor) and brought to a suburban house in Sussex, which appears to be the childhood home of the reclusive multibillionaire (Mark Monero) whom Riley is supposed to be writing an article about. He is an oligarch who has invented a “Brain Collider”, like the Large Hadron Collider only the size of someone’s front room and which is used for investigating the universal mysteries of consciousness.

The house is a portal to the great intergalactic beyond or conceivably the infinite interior of the mind, through which Riley’s reporter is of course to tumble. He comes into contact with an elegant and charismatic woman (Lara) who may be his friend, his guide through the cosmic 3D madness, or his most dangerous enemy. You have to make friends with the jauntiness and zaniness of this film and to forgive its sometimes rather laborious quality, and Lara’s deadpan drollery is always watchable.

• Bulk is at the Nickel, London on 15 January, then tours.