This movie is clearly a labor of love, and the imaginative cinematography as well as Victorian-era inspired dialogue are its strongest points. The music is also quite fitting.
Unfortunately, other flaws keep it from becoming something like an indie classic: the pace is plodding, despite changes of scenery it still has a strong "stagey" feel, and the plot twist is easy to foretell much sooner than the reveal.
The story is actually quite simple, but may be harder to follow if one does not have some background knowledge to notice the many historical references in the movie. So here is a little primer:
Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland, was the nom de plume of Charles Dodgson, a mathematician and cleric. He enjoyed the then-new art from of photography, and would often take pictures of young children, including nude photographs. There are some allegations, not resolved either way, that he may have been a pedophile. He suffered from a stammer which made it difficult for him to speak in public, but he had a voluminous exchange in letters with others, including many of his ''child-friends'' in which he posed a number of riddles. His 'Alice in Wonderland' may have been based on an actual child acquaintance, Alice Liddell.
Nicephore Niepce is usually credited as the inventor of photography. He was French and died right around Dodgson's birth, so the two could never have met in real life.
Franz Kafka is regarded as one of the most important novelists of the 20th century, and his most famous story, 'The Metamorphosis', in which a man wakes up one day to discover that he has become a gigantic insect, is briefly alluded to in the movie. The protagonists in his stories are often faced with bizarre, logic-defying situations for which his name has become an eponym.
People who like art-house movies with fantastic themes may enjoy this movie, but others will probably find it too hard to relate to.
