If Jarman’s sense of self-sacrifice can seem vainglorious and transparent, consider that it’s also self-mocking, silly, and, for a non-believer, apt. He could not by dying save anyone from death—but then again, neither could Christ, in Jarman’s estimation. What both could offer was the image of their suffering and the eminently exploitable idea, born of hope, fear, desperation, historical circumstance, savvy, or whatever, that their agony might have meant something. In any case, the passion of this Christ scarcely registers as absurd in context. Naked men clamber down a rock pit on their bellies. A Satan-figure writhes around in leather. The apocalyptical tenor of the affair, at times overemphasized by discordant string arrangements, is leavened by pink-filtered scenes of paradise, as well as what Swinton once approvingly described as the “whiff of the school play” that scents Jarman’s work.

Swinton might as easily have said the “whiff of the home movie.” The Garden is set mostly, and appropriately, in and around Jarman’s now-famous garden in Dungeness, Kent—an arid headland in the southeast of England known for a then-operational nuclear power plant. The director had purchased a cottage in sight of the plant in the wake of his diagnosis. Outside it, he cultivated poppy, holly, dill, crocus, iris, helichrysum, a fig tree, and more, and arranged flint and flotsam and jetsam into shapes that pleased him. He wrote about the growth of the terrestrial and filmic gardens in his diaries from this period, 1989-1990, published as the exquisite Modern Nature, and in the loveliest seconds of his movie, many of them shot on Super 8, the two gardens become one. Petals glow green or yellow. Grasses bow in the gale. Swinton crouches among clumps of lavender.

Since his death, Jarman—who’s probably best known in the US for his final feature, beautiful Blue (1993), which I’ve heard described, more or less accurately, as “the saddest film ever made”—has become a tourist destination in addition to an artist. Pilgrims flock to Dungeness. His fame grows. A holy site is a selling point, and a garden is a good one. The Garden, however, isn’t after your devotion or its associated tokens; its ambitions are grander and less attainable than sainthood. As Jarman writes in Modern Nature, “Strands of thought crisscross, but one thing is clear: the film must show the quaint illusion of narrative cinema threadbare.” Elsewhere: “Had I not raised a hopeless banner against the admen of the Cinema Renaissance, entered a battle I knew I would never win—not even posthumously as they held all the cards?” The banner still flies. Death is not the end. It’s an opportunity.

Paul McAdory is a writer and editor from Mississippi. He lives in Brooklyn.