The parallels between The Beaver and that of its star Mel Gibson are almost too uncanny to be true. The film arrives at a very difficult time for Gibson, with his popularity perhaps lower than ever following a slew of racist, sexist and anti-Semitic outbursts coupled with his ongoing battle against alcoholism. Walter Black (Gibson) stumbles upon the eponymous handpuppet when facing a comparable personal crisis. Suffering from a crippling depression that barely allows him out of bed, let alone able to deal with his marriage (to director Jodie Foster) or his two sons – Anton Yelchin and Riley Thomas Stewart, Walter is ejected from the family home and discovers the mangy toy in a skip, after a failed suicide attempt.

What the film does next is its single greatest triumph. We never see how Walter comes to the decision of talking through “The Beaver”. It is thrust upon us, as his fully formed last-ditch attempt at rehabilitation. Kyle Killen’s script presents Walter’s idea to the other characters in exactly the same way. So as the audience struggles to accept the absurd notion of Mad Mel acting dead straight with a stuffed animal on his arm, so must his family, friends, employees and eventually the public at large.

What is most surprising bout The Beaver is how well it works. Gibson delivers one of his very best performances as a man with nothing left to give and everything to lose, whose one last shot at life already signposts quite clearly that this guy has already lost the fight. The decision to give the beaver a Ray Winstone cockney accent is strange, particularly when Gibson has a perfectly good and underused Australian one, but it works nevertheless. While the beaver’s antics do offer up some moments of levity, this is by no means a comedy, but rather a complex family drama with occasional moments of comic relief. Some critics have lamented Foster’s humourless directorial style and wished for someone more eccentric (Gondry or Jonze perhaps), but a more off-kilter environment would have detracted from the desperate craziness of Walter’s actions, which are the very core of the film.

The Beaver is about finding your voice and learning to express yourself, whatever the consequences. This applies not only to Walter, but his son Porter, who writes term papers for other students and fears becoming his father. It also applies to his love interest Jennifer Lawrence, who has buried her artistic passion beneath grief she refuses to deal with. Killen’s script notoriously sat on the Hollywood black list for more than a decade before finally going into production and it’s hard to imagine anyone believed it could succeed this well. However, for all Foster’s assured craft and subtlety, it is Gibson who truly sells the film, by laying his soul bare and convincing us, not that he’s crazy enough to act through a hand puppet, but that he may yet find the road to recovery.