Birth, love, sex, marriage, war, religion — all in under two hours. Nobody can accuse director Simon Pummell of lacking ambition. In Bodysong, his debut feature, he explores life, death and everything in between using film snippets that fall into six broad categories: birth, growth, sex, violence, death, dreams. Culled from news libraries, feature films and private collections, and spanning the past century of cinema, the largely dialogue-free collage is accompanied by a website (www.bodysong.com) that details the story behind each of the 400-plus shots.

As a film, Bodysong (released in the U.K. on Dec. 5) is an utterly mesmerizing and humbling portrait of humanity. But as a concept, it isn't nearly as profound or important as it wants to be. Opening with the microscopics of conception, the film makes some big promises — to tell everything, to hide nothing, to open our eyes to the world around us — and makes a noble effort of keeping them. The chronology moves dependably from birth to childhood to adulthood, old age and death, touching on concepts like sport, language and war on the way, and drawing parallels between different cultures and eras.

With help from a haunting score by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, Pummell often manages to turn cliché on its head. In tense slo-mo and played over an ominous orchestral soundtrack, the miracle of birth becomes a series of torture scenes and the love sequence is more cynical than sweet. A few of the images are instantly recognizable — Tiananmen Square, Vietnam , Jackson Pollock dribbling on a sheet of glass — but aren't given any special attention, quickly and smoothly finding their places in amongst the anonymous faces. The ceaseless flow of imagery makes some explicit links between themes (feasting Westerners and Africa's famine babies, sex and violence, sport and war), while also inviting individual interpretation. Out of a more tangible context, though, most of it gets lost in the flood. It's all so fascinating, so overwhelming and so "meaningful" that it ultimately becomes meaningless.

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nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu) Luckily, the film is only half the point. By building a website to explain and expand his vision, Pummell joins the growing league of filmmakers who use the Internet as an extension of their films (from the Wachowski brothers' slick Matrix site to Peter Greenaway's cryptic Tulse Luper Suitcases pages), taking the step from passive observation to active engagement. Knowing the history of each image helps transform it from a symbol of some overarching theme to an example of personal human experience, all the more universal in its detail. (In a twist of unfortunate — and hopefully unintended — irony, navigation of the 3D site demands a large screen and a speedy connection, so this project meant to encompass everyone can only be fully grasped by the tech-blessed few.)

If Pummell's objective was simply to use film's two best attributes — the ability to record the past and tell a story — to show us what we already know (it's a small world, after all), then Bodysong does its job well. But there's the sense that he wants it to be bigger than that, a revelation. No such luck. The film only brings up more questions than it does answers, and not about humankind, but about the filmmaker himself. For instance, why does he separate the cycle of life (birth to death) from the values that make us distinctly human (religion, dreams, art)? Why does he devote more time to porn than to love? And why did he chose to show this film in theaters, where it will only be seen by a curious handful, when he could have shown it as an installation in a gallery, guaranteeing larger numbers and a more open audience?

With Bodysong, Pummell may have had good intentions, but in trying to tell us all about ourselves, he only ends up bringing everything back to him.

• JUMANA FAROUKY
• Bodysong is a tribute to the power of film, but falls short of its aspirations.