But when that organ riff kicks in, those big, churning, Bach-esque chords the size of a cathedral, something in my chest responds whether I want it to or not. Webber’s melodies are unkillable. He exerts. You can dismiss his shows as gaudy, shameless and slightly inhuman without crossing over into charming camp, and plenty of people do. But something in his tunes and stories knocks you on your butt no matter how much you try to resist.

And you will resist. This adaptation is a pretty illegible and incoherent take on a pretty flat and simple story, to be frank. It’s not doing the source material (or the source’s source material, a much-adapted 1910 novel by Gaston Leroux) many favors. This Phantom (Gerard Butler) is a disfigured musical genius who lives in the lake beneath the Paris Opera House (which really exists, though not this attractively). He manipulates the theater’s owners to follow his whims, and he grooms the ingenue Christine (Emmy Rossum), an orphan who also lives in the opera house, to be a star. When Christine reconnects with her childhood sweetheart Raoul (Patrick Wilson), now a wealthy patron, a love triangle between the Phantom, Christine, and Raoul rots into coercion and violence. The story shares DNA with Beauty and the Beast and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, a part of that noble tradition of French ugly dudes pining from the shadows for beautiful maidens, the ugly anti-heroes flawed even as they perceive real problems in society.

But Phantom of the Opera, at least in this screenplay, only scratches at the contradictions lying within those themes rather than fully unspooling them. This version, which exists more as a romantic melodrama with some murders than a romantic horror, is just a mess of underdeveloped characters and stodgy dialogue, leaving little interest about where Christine’s heart lies: with the dangerous, passionate outcast, or the dashing nobleman. It never really earns the chemistry or tension required to make the love triangle land the way it’s written here, to tear our hearts in half the way Webber positions the doomed romance: the Phantom is just too overwrought and unsympathetic for this kind of telling, Christine too flat, Raoul too bland. The chemistry is all flat, fairy tale romance without pulse. You have to bring your own subtext if you want much to chew on. The more traditional horror spin on the story puts the nightmarish currents of the story more front and center.

Schumacher reportedly wanted a “rock and roll guy” for the Phantom regardless of vocal ability, and that’s how you end up with handsome Butler wearing a quarter-face mask and straining through songs written for Michael Crawford’s operatic tenor. The unmasking itself, one of cinema’s all-time great images in the 1925 Lon Chaney version, is a total non-event here. By the time we get a full prosthetic reveal late in the film, it amounts to some scarring on a conventionally attractive man. Who could love a monster such as Gerard Butler? Rossum, to her credit, brings adorable, wide-eyed sincerity to a role that doesn’t have much psychological depth, though the fact that she was seventeen during filming adds an uncomfortable layer to the romantic material that’s ripe with lust.

The structural choices are also muddled. On stage, the chandelier crashes at the end of Act One: that’s your defying gravity moment, your big curtain-dropper. But 21st century movies don’t have intermissions (unless you’re The Brutalist), so Schumacher relocates the chandelier drop to the climax, where it gets mixed up in the chaos of the finale. It robs the moment of its singular, turning point impact. This disconnect is emblematic of the movie’s broader problem of sloppy plotting.

Schumacher gets at least one thing right, and that is the production, which is busy, extravagant, and tacky in a fun way. And unlike Wicked, it’s cleanly lit so you can enjoy it: The film lets you soak in the tremendous sound stage recreations of the Paris opera house. The costumes are good fun, too; a black-and-white masquerade evokes the climax of An American in Paris, and it wasn’t the only garment that reminded me of classic studio Hollywood glitz.

I keep coming back to the grand sweep of the music, though. Webber’s motific musical composition, which shifts genres and moods between characters, only for musical ideas to resurface at a point of emotional connection or shift in mood, is satisfying and more sophisticated than his detractors give him credit for, even if the execution is a messy panorama rather than something cohesive and focused. Phantom of the Opera is far from a great movie, and I am open to the argument that it is not even be a good one. But I watched it and I accepted it for what it was. Not every musical needs to be a piece of art. Sometimes the chandelier just needs to fall.

The film, directed by Tom Hooper, opens with a pedestal shot swooping down from the sky, scored to a jangly, nerve-shredding score, and before you even register a single image, you already feel assaulted. A human tosses a kitten in a bag out of a car window as strange figures move in the shadows, and what emerges is no mere feline but a cat-woman; and not a sexy leather-clad criminal, but a violation of the laws of nature. The character designs, inspired by the stage show but unholy on screen, got every conceivable choice wrong. These are human faces pasted onto smooshy, bipedal cat bodies with a digital fur texture. It does not suggest “cat,” it suggests “corruption.” They have human hands and bare human feet (except for maybe three out of the twenty-five who inexplicably wear shoes). The result parks itself so deep in uncanny valley that even a still image is enough to make you flinch, and then you remember that almost every person on screen is a genuine superstar and somebody spent the GDP of a small nation to inflict this on the world, and it’s simply too much to process.

There’s a reason the stage version of Cats has not caused the collective cultural nausea that the film has, and it is: the abstraction of the stage. When you’re in a theater watching people in face paint and fur bodysuits doing acrobatic cat poses from forty feet away, your brain fills in the gaps. You imagine an anthropomorphized cat. It has a charm to it, a theatrical curiosity at the physical marvel before you. But rendering that exact same concept on film, where CGI is supposed to create more realistic rather than abstract imagery, reverse-engineers the magic into something grotesque. The almost-all-digital recreation of the stage costumes and sets that Hooper and his team landed on is simply misbegotten. The always-moving camera weaves around these digital bodies in a way that triggers both motion sickness and aesthetic sickness. For long stretches, I genuinely could not tell what, if anything, was physically real in the mise-en-scene. The digital gloss coats everything so thoroughly that even real objects look fake.

And the structure, such as it is, amounts to this: the first half of the movie is cats introducing themselves, and the other half is a talent show where the winner gets sent to heaven. Or something like that; everything is discussed in a garbled nonsense argot. A white cat named Victoria (Francesca Hayward) finds herself in an alley, and then for the next hundred minutes, one Jellicle Cat after another steps forward with a new wacky name, sings a song with some made up words, and generally has one trait: Here’s a fat one. This one’s a magician. And look at this femme fatale cat played by Taylor Swift. The cats start coming and they don’t stop coming. I was reminded, multiple times, of Alice in Wonderland (which I am generally not a fan of) if it had even less connective tissue and coherent character motivations; unordered encounters stacked on top of each other, none of it accruing towards anything resembling a narrative.

The entire affair is a litany of horrors, but here are a few memorable ones: Jennyanydots (Rebel Wilson) unzips her own fur like it’s a jacket, revealing human clothes underneath, and then more fur underneath those clothes before devouring a kick-line of tiny cockroaches. Later, Macavity (Idris Elba) spends most of his screen time in a human overcoat, then suddenly strips it off to reveal a body with no stripes, no markings. Just smooth, blank skin. He simply looks nude in a poorly-textured CGI body. Bombalurina (Taylor Swift) descends from the rafters tossing catnip like a controlled substance while cats collapse around her into induced slumber. (But doesn’t catnip stimulate cats?) Old Deuteronomy (Judi Dench) looks impossibly ancient, her whole body a wrinkled extension of her face. The movie keeps finding new floors beneath what you thought was rock bottom.

So why am I not bestowing Cats the lowest possible rating on the “Is It Good?” scale? I generally hold that to be dull is the worst sin a movie can commit, and that to authentically provoke is at least to be interesting in ways art should be. I walked into Cats half-expecting to swerve positive, that maybe its unholiness, its sheer baroque audacity, would horseshoe into something perversely entertaining like George of the Jungle 2. And it has flickers: the Jennyanydots sequence embraces its loopiness in a pleasing way, and plenty of other images present eye-searing monstrosities with earnestness in a manner that had me chuckling at the misalignment. Plus, Jennifer Hudson belting “Memory” as Grizabella is a moment where real talent cuts through the wreckage. But the fascination mostly curdles into bafflement rather than enjoyment, and that in turn translates to disengagement. Boredom. Nothing registers because nothing makes sense, and the absence of any coherent storytelling means there’s nothing for your brain to latch onto. Even as a sequence of nightmare music videos, it’s not flashy, stylish, or rhythmic enough to be fun. Cats is not so-bad-it’s-good, both because I don’t believe that concept exists (see, again, my tirade in my George of the Jungle 2 review), and because its baffling off-center aesthetic doesn’t circle back quite enough into joyful mayhem. It is, instead, so-broken-it’s-unmissable, which is a different and considerably lesser thing, but still special. Cats might be the single most memorable movie of 2019, the one that cuts through the noise and pierces your skull, though it’s more trepanation than subversive brilliance. Memorable and good are not the same word, and this film, a harbinger of the end of the world, never lets you forget that distinction.