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Most notably is the gutsy performance from Mel Gibson, who must have known that this was never going to be a safe comeback vehicle even before his latest PR meltdown.

It’s not a stupid film, nor insensitive to the characters’ unhappiness. In a way, it might have been a more satisfying movie if it hadn’t been directed with Foster’s evident care and intelligence. If it had been raw and ragged, a low budget borderline exploitation flick, it might have sold its out-there premise more easily to an audience looking for something culty and quirky.

But Foster has chosen not to pitch Kyle Killen’s acclaimed screenplay as a black comedy, but to play it straight. She’s Oprah-fied it.

That puts the onus on the audience to swallow a middle aged businessman in a tug of war for his sanity and soul with a glove puppet in the form of a beaver. I don’t know about you, but I’d find it easier to swallow my right shoe.

Gibson is Walter Black, a husband and father, and the CEO of a smallish toy company. Like other Gibson characters before him, he’s depressed to the point of suicide, and an alcoholic to boot. Waking up alone in a hotel room the morning after he’s tried to end it all, Walter gets a sharp tongue-lashing from an unexpected source – the glove puppet he found among the personal effects his wife Meredith (Jodie Foster) had boxed up for him, and couldn’t bring himself to throw away.

The Beaver is making an intervention. Speaking in a throaty, vaguely Antipodean voice (check out that condescending epithet “luv” he reserves for Meredith), he’s saying what needs to be said: Walter needs to get back in touch with his kids, his family and his business operations in a hands-on way… Or rather, a “hand-on” way, since one hand is now permanently occupied with his “prescription puppet." The Beaver makes one stipulation: his advice isn’t take it or leave it. From now on, they will make every decision together, and the Beaver will never leave Walter’s side.

You might think this would result in a fast ticket to the funny farm, but Meredith can’t deny that the new Walter is a marked improvement on the old model, and she chooses to believe her husband’s claim that his shrink has come up with this radical therapy.

Even Walter’s colleagues at the toy business accept it. When he puts the entire factory to manufacturing beaver carpentry sets, no one resists – and of course the new line becomes an instant hit. Seems you can’t turn on the business report without seeing Walter’s face – and his toothy friend’s.

The only one who remains unimpressed is his older son, Porter (Anton Yelchin), who has issues of his own. He’s so angy he clobbers a new window in his bedroom wall with his fist. (Which he thoughtfully covers over with a poster.)

A very odd mixture of the self-help cinema clichés (especially in the teenage subplot involving Yelchin and girlfriend Jennifer Lawrence) and completely off-the-wall scenes in which the Beaver seems not just a flat-tailed split personality disorder but a demonic being in the tradition of Chucky or the possessive dummies in Magic or Dead of Night, this film never finds a plausible tone or consistency. It’s not going too far to say it’s embarrassing to watch.

So why have I given it two stars? One for curiosity value (it will certainly stay with you), and one for Gibson’s performance, which is as committed and accomplished as any piece of screen acting he has given in a long time. Admittedly this portrait of a man on the edge of a nervous breakdown may not have been a stretch – the part fits him like a glove.