“A discovery that will shake the foundations of literature”. That is Petter Amundsen’s astonishing promise in Jorgen Friberg’s entertainingly dotty documentary about Shakespeare, a mysterious cult, and buried treasure on a remote Canadian island. X marks the spot.

In SHAKESPEARE: THE HIDDEN TRUTH, Amundsen, a Norwegian church organist, claims to have deciphered hidden messages in the First Folio of the Bard’s complete works, which were first published in 1623. Strange patterns buried in the text, says Amundsen, point to other true authors of Hamlet, Macbeth et al. – most notably Sir Francis Bacon. But his cryptographical research does not end there. He also asserts that the clues buried in the book lead to revelation of one of the greatest secrets of all time – not the Holy Grail, but the lost treasures of King Herod’s Temple in Jerusalem and the so-far undiscovered handwritten manuscripts of Shakespeare’s plays.

For reasons not made entirely clear, Shakespeare, Bacon, Ben Jonson and others may have been part of some Freemason-like sect who have taken holy booty and buried it deep in the backwoods of Newfoundland.

Though this could all be quickly dismissed as fanciful claptrap, Friberg has a filmic ace up his sleeve: enter Robert Crompton, a young British ‘Shakespeare expert’ brought in to do battle with Amundsen’s outlandish arguments. We follow Crompton on a physical and intellectual journey – from waking up in his London flat and buying his morning latte, to his first encounter with the ice-cool Amundsen in the deep snows of a Norwegian winter. Later they take a surreal trip to a Canadian swamp.

Crompton is a natural in front of camera and the most engaging part of this movie is his growing frustration with Amundsen’s bizarre claims and alchemical methods of discovery. We, like him, are treated to increasingly complex cryptology with Friberg’s fluid camera work zooming on the manuscripts and highlighting the supposed patterns of words which, says Amundsen, reveal the Big Secret. With a dramatic underscore punctuating each of the revelations, Crompton’s resolve to maintain a cool academic scepticism is slowly eroded.

We are introduced to a Swiss typographer described as ‘one of the most intelligent in the world’ who believes the whole shebang.

He, and one suspects Friberg, begins to believe Amundsen’s thesis that Shakespeare was a front man for a cabal of proto-Freemasons. The plays were actually written by Bacon and his nephew and the First Folio is littered with secret messages leading us to Treasure Island. We are introduced to a Swiss typographer described as ‘one of the most intelligent in the world’ who believes the whole shebang. What more proof could one want? Strangely, there is no interview with any established Shakespeare scholar but then we are told about a massive academic cover up (no surprise here).

Though this is entertaining hokum, the film’s weakness lies in Friberg’s seeming sympathy for Amundsen’s fairy tale. In the second half, as Crompton is brought round to the treasure hunt story, the message falls into the full Dan Brown trap. In an epilogue to this over-long documentary, we are told that any time now, the secrets of Treasure Island will be revealed. Or maybe not.

Friberg admits that the documentary has changed his life. Making the piece was, he says, a long and often frustrating process: his storyboarding plans were often thrown out of the window as Amundsen’s revelations became ever more complex. “The film took me over three years to edit and I got tons of material I couldn’t use. I had to throw out Plan A, B and I think we got to Plan G. The end product is far away from what I planned – I wasn’t sure what I wanted to film any more but I had to make the story work.” It isn’t clear whether Friberg is serious in saying, “I had a terrible time making this film.”

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