Trippy might be the best word to sum up the film. If I interpreted correctly (which it's totally possible that I didn't because it's just that sort of movie), a man uses psychoactive drug laced parasitic slugs to take control of people and rob them. Then one of his victims, now with a fractured psyche, tries to reclaim her sense of self and discover the mystery behind what happened to her.
It's a film of extremes; of extreme non-linearity, of extreme abstraction. It's extremely dreamlike in that way where things in dreams make sense while you're following along with the dream's twisted logic, but if you start to dig deeper, it becomes harder to tell what is really going on. But, boy, you've definitely gone through something singularly vibrant and potentially lyrical. At its best its mesmerizing and intoxicating. It's sad and mind-bending and totally unlike anything I've ever seen.
*From Shane Carruth, the writer/director of Primer, another film of surficial simplicity with hidden depths, and an incredibly complex narrative. Carruth also plays Jeff in the film.
*I still don't have it all quite figured out. It's intentionally meant to be confusing, but at times I was just going wah? But that's the point of it. It's meant to melt your mind into goop with its pretensions of ambiguity and weirdness.
*Visually though it's a real treat; just really beautiful and stunning, which contrasts really nicely with the obliqueness elsewhere (kind of like how Terrence Mallick makes his movies).
*There's a rather sweet romance plot in the midst of all the craziness. The film takes something that ought to be a meet cute and turns it into something pleasingly much more subversive. This a movie about broken people coming together to feel less broken.
*The change of hair on Kris a third of the way through the film is a nice subtle change to signify shift in state of mind/identity. The film, I think, is a lot about identity.
*A great performance by Amy Seimetz as Kris.
Is it pretentious? A little bit. It's one of those films that's aware that's it's trying to be intellectual and make you think and junk. But it's also so unlike anything you're gonna see elsewhere that you have to give it the credit for not being conventional. Sure, some of it is probably just bullshit and purposely a little unnecessarily convoluted, impenetrable and weird but sometimes that's the admission price to something unique.
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