In Terry Gilliam's bracingly grim new "12 Monkeys," the present looks like the future, the future looks like the past, and the past looks truly dreadful. "12 Monkeys" is a time-travel yarn, so this kind of circular paradox comes natural to it.

The present, our present, is represented chiefly by tile-walled mental wards and burned-out inner-city squats. The past appears as a brief glimpse of the mustard-gas-ridden trenches of the First World War. And in the plague-wracked future, technology has devolved into an antiquated mess of reel-to-reel tape recorders and clockwork mechanisms painted a Royal Typewriter black. Everybody lives underground; to venture on the surface requires a Saran-wrap "body condom."

We know by now to expect both visual daring and moral heft from Gilliam, who made "Brazil" and "The Fisher King." What's remarkable about "12 Monkeys" is that, despite its decade-hopping abandon, the film makes a chilling kind of narrative sense. To Gilliam's quiver of attributes this new movie adds a quality that's on the endangered list in today's Hollywood: coherence.

Next page: Who's really crazy?