“MAYBE God made me a painter for people who aren’t born yet,” Willem Dafoe’s Vincent van Gogh confides to a quizzical priest (Mads Mikkelsen) in this film set during the last two years of Van Gogh’s existence in Arles and Auvers-sur-Oise in France.

This no straightforward in-depth biography but a painterly film from co-writer and director Julian Schnabel that attempts to show what it was like to be the painter and walk in his shoes.

As the poor and struggling artist traipses through the French countryside, he attempts to be at one with nature and capture the glorious sunlight.

“I feel lost if I don’t have something to look at … the essence of nature is beauty,” he tells Paul Gaugin (Oscar Isaac).

With frenetic, shaky camerawork, Schnabel attempts to portray Van Gogh’s mental instability and his confusion as he suffers loss of memory and blackouts and, when you are seeing Van Gogh’s surroundings through his own eyes, the bottom of the screen begins to blur.

Dafoe, who deservedly won an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Van Gogh, gives an extraordinary performance in conveying his genius, unstable mental state, anger and increasing melancholia.

The film also conveys his touching and loving relationship with his younger brother Theo (Rupert Friend), who bankrolled his work and paid Gaugin to keep Van Gogh company in Arles.

There’s a lot of philosophising and navel-gazing from the pair and Van Gogh’s dramatic ear self-mutilation is absent — it is merely referred to by a medic who recommends the bandaged-up painter to voluntarily admit himself into a local asylum.

In the wake of Loving Vincent two years ago, this is another surreal and impressionistic portrait of this legendary artist.