Do you ever get the feeling that the world might be coming to an end? Tune into NPR or the BBC on any given day and you'll hear the most outrageous things - wars, disease, genocide and terror attacks - recounted in the most calm, collected manner. It's enough to drive a lonely, obsessive man off the rails, until he's sitting alone in the woods with a shotgun, shooting at birds and burning their corpses on a gasoline fire.

This is exactly what happens to the hero of Radio, Patrick Boivin's astonishingly well-crafted psychological mystery. This is the film about schizophrenia that Brad Anderson's The Machinist wanted to be, and it works on a metaphorical level that captures the anxiety of the moment. I'm giving it my highest recommendation.

The hero is an average-looking man who works as a hospital orderly. On the graveyard shift one night, he hears a muffled voice inside one of the patients' rooms - perhaps an alter ego experiencing its first birth pangs. He buys a junky old radio to listen to on his shift. A girl who also works at the hospital, a nymphomaniac with the emerald-green eyes of a cat, goes down on him in a closet. The radio gets stuck on a doom-and-gloom newscast, and the poor guy can't get it up as the announcer (voiced by Ian Finlay) goes on and on about a venereal disease outbreak.

The news keeps getting worse. Humanity may be on the brink of a worldwide epidemic as a new strand of the avian flu virus is identified. (The hero never seems able to turn the radio off, suggesting the voice is inside his head.) Birds squawk ominously outside the hospital, and "all persons in possession of firearms are authorized to..." He grabs his gun and retreats to the woods like he's starring in the next George A. Romero zombie flick, finally reduced to an all-out kook.

Boivin uses his considerable skill as a director to put us in the hero's headspace. Even the transitions in this movie are designed down to the last detail. This is the work of an exceptionally apt and exacting creative mind.

Radio could have been a cold (albeit brilliantly executed) piece of work, but the hero's struggle to hold onto his sanity by the skin of his fingers is ultimately very moving. In the movie's bleak final moments lies a hopeful message of humanity trying to find its way.