Magical thinking: conjuring lavish visual environments from the most ordinary materials, and drawing outlandish tales from true stories, Saskia Olde Wolbers makes videos of hypnotic beauty

Saskia Olde Wolbers's studio, in London, is small and not overly tidy. There are piles of papers and books, a slightly funky empty fish tank, remnants of various synthetic fabrics and trimmings, and nothing easily identified as useful for making art. Her videos, on the other hand, are marvels of perfection, seamlessly constructed worlds of falsehood and disorientation in which unseen protagonists traffic in assumed identities, faking everything from professional credentials to family status. Their tales are characterized by porous temporal and spatial boundaries, and by weak distinctions between waking life and dreaming, biology and technology, cause and effect. Most disturbing of all, they each harbor at least a kernel of truth.

None hew closer to events from life than the utterly implausible Placebo (2002), which draws on news coverage of Jean-Claude Romand, a Frenchman who for 18 years fooled his nearest and dearest into believing he worked for the World Health Organization; Romand killed his family and himself in 1993 when his story began to unravel. Placebo's narrator is the pseudo-doctor's fictional mistress, an auto accident victim who speaks from within a futuristic hospital room. In a slow, sonorous voice-over, the nameless woman--like all the characters in Olde Wolbers's videos, she remains off-screen--reviews her history with the man she long thought was a surgeon, but whom she has discovered to be an exceptionally thorough fraud; even the marriage that she thought he was cheating on was invented. Unfortunately, the narrator's suspicions had become apparent, hence the car crash, which was deliberate. Her chances of survival, she says calmly, are modest, of recovering speech even smaller. But her monologue is a model of eloquence--it is we who stumble through the narrative in confusion. Olde Wolbers, that is, has her audience pursue in double time the trajectory of the narrator's experience. As a soothing, smoothly competent speaker leads us through an antiseptic if bewildering world, we slowly come to understand her predicament, and to share in her grim confirmation of her worst fears. Her recollection of a romantic relationship in which "description was made to substitute for shared experience" delivers a particularly potent jolt of recognition, since of course that is precisely our lot as viewers.

For aural backdrop, there are the quietly creepy pings and beeps of hospitals. Even more unnerving is the setting, a pair of cocoon-like beds built into a gridded chamber that drips and bubbles with a slow-moving white fluid. The gravitational field roves, so the whole mise-en-scene occasionally rotates or flips, its fluids dripping sideways and upside down. A spiraling ridged tube intermittently drills through the frame, and over the course of the video (all of Olde Wolbers's work to date are between five and 10 minutes long), the ambient light dims, the beds vanish and walls blow away, though not in a strictly linear progression. Perhaps because it's all shot in a constricted range of grays, the predominant sloshing and plopping isn't repellently visceral. Instead it is deeply, almost soporifically hypnotic, its woozy perspectives a good match for the indeterminacy of the protagonists' roles. As its name implies, Placebo keeps menace in abeyance for anyone who lends it credence; Scheherazade-style, it both evokes and induces a provisionally protective, stupefying trance.

In 2001: A Space Odyssey, a landmark among filmic representations of space, an astronaut walks down a spaceship corridor that slowly rotates; heedlessly, he keeps right on walking, ending up (with respect to us) upside down. There is no there up there, is director Stanley Kubrick's point--an absence of fixed spatial coordinates that, unsurprisingly, proves hugely metaphorical. The same is abundantly true of Placebo, though Kubrick is not one of the writers and filmmakers cited by the omnivorously inquisitive Olde Wolbers. Born in 1971 in Breda and raised in the Netherlands, Olde Wolbers began her art education at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and completed it at the Chelsea College of Art and Design in London. But clearly, she remains an avid student of, among other things, film and fiction. Robert Altman and Lars von Trier are among those she does name as influences, along with Les Blank for his Burden of Dreams, a documentary about Werner Herzog's filming of Fitzcarraldo; this loosely historical story of a madly heroic effort to build an opera house in the Amazon rain forest is a tale of creative ambition brought to the pitch of mania, the first time by the real Fitzcarraldo, the second, as Blank reveals, by Herzog. What all of these directors share is impatience with the constraints of credibility, and a knack for demonstrating that the world doesn't much conform to them either. The neurologist Oliver Sacks and the naturalist David Attenborough are on Olde Wolbers's playlist too, for their uncanny ability to find human and animal behaviors that trash the conventional parameters not only of psychological and ethological field studies, but of realism itself.