Finders Keepers: is this the weirdest film of the year?

A bizarre US documentary, Finders Keepers, which tells a hard-to-believe but true story about a custody battle over a severed leg has been dubbed the "weirdest movie of the year" by critics.

The Kickstarter-funded film, directed by Bryan Carberry and Clay Tweel, centres on the story of how Shannon Whisnant found a leg inside a barbecue smoker he bought at an auction. The true story combines elements of comedy and tragedy, beginning with a 911 call from a horrified Whisnant moments after he makes the find.

It turns out that the leg belongs to John Wood, the dissolute son of a successful North Carolina businessman, who lost it in a small plane crash that also claimed the life of his father. Hoping to create some sort of a memorial to his father with the leg, Wood, who also suffers from drug and alcohol problems, embarks on a comedy of errors, which ends in him losing his worldly goods in a repossession sale. Wood then embarks on a legal battle to reclaim the leg, after Wishnant decides to keep it and charge people to see it.

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Critics have been bemused and delighted by the film.

It's a "delightfully insane documentary", says Brian Moylan in The Guardian. This "grandiose and hysterical tale is something right out of Storage Wars".

It's not only "slickly directed" and "fast-paced", but this "laugh-out-loud movie pays as much attention to the comedy of the story as the humanity".

The directors have crafted the "weirdest documentary of the year", says Jen Yamoto, on the Daily Beast. It's a "goldmine for quirky, can't-make-it-up comedy thanks to its two Southern fried subjects." But Finders Keepers gets serious as it "moves past exploiting its subjects to explore the legal and moral quarrel between them".

In Variety, Andrew Barker praises a "hysterical, insightful and genuinely empathetic" documentary, which could be a cult hit. Barker says that while the film gleefully indulges in the absurdities of "one of the decade's weirdest man-bites-dog news stories" it also halts the laughter to "dig deep into the pain and struggles of the real people involved".

However, Christopher Gray in Slant magazine remains unconvinced. Gray says this "quirky media-sensation doc" doesn't condescend its subjects "but it does exploit them for the sake of a superficial crowd-pleaser".

It makes for some "queasy viewing", he says, as the directors lurch clumsily between screwball humour and recollections of personal tragedy set to maudlin music, with Wood and Whisnant opening up about cold fathers and their struggles with addiction.

It's a wild yarn, admits Gray, but that's all it aspires to be. "Its gestures toward any statements about class and micro-celebrity are fleeting and half-hearted."

Finders Keepers is available on iTunes and on demand from 2 October.