Puzzle It Out

Puzzlehead

Directed by James Bai

Calling James Bai's promising feature debut, Puzzlehead, a Frankenstein movie is accurate up to a point, but it doesn't begin to capture the film's unnerving ambition. While its mad-scientist-creates-artificial-life plot invokes Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, it isn't content to rehash the story in modern dress. Instead, it tears Shelley's narrative apart like a cadaver, stitches some of its bits with pieces of other genres and builds an ungainly yet often magnificent new beast: part psychological drama, part fairy tale, part domestic drama. The last aspect dominates. Without losing sight of its literary source or pretending to be something other than what it is (a poverty-row indie), Puzzlehead evolves as it unreels, becoming less a Frankenstein gloss than a psychological fable about fathers and their sons.

Set in a an unspecified city in a plague-depopulated Western nation, Puzzlehead stars Stephen Galaida in the dual role of the hermit scientist Walter and his creation, Puzzlehead, an android he invented to be a housekeeper, a companion and a sort of walking repository of Walter's skills, life experiences and values. He's part child, part slave, part clone.

Puzzlehead is narrated by the creature, who looks back on his short, sad life after having gained self-awareness and autonomy. But he's still an android whose reductive, spotty perceptions are formed by his short, rigidly controlled life experience and his programming. (Which also includes Philip K. Dick-style implanted memories, which Puzzlehead says are "like senseless silent films stored in my brain by accident.")

The opening section depicts Puzzlehead's creation and instruction (his childhood and youth). The middle section is the creature's adolescence, the period when he takes his first baby steps into a lonely and violent world.

The final section, Puzzlehead's adulthood, blindsided me. Like David Lynch's post-Twin Peaks films, it twists the narrative around so that its two main characters essentially change roles and become each other. Wedding Shelly to Freud, Bai turns Frankenstein from a cautionary tale about the scientist-as-God into a fable about how fathers try to shape sons in their own images in order to live through them-not vicariously in this case, but literally.

It's a stunning conceit, and thanks to Bai's precisely modulated direction and Galaida's muted, clean, controlled performance in the film's archetypal dual roles, it works so brilliantly that the movie's technical flaws (obviously dubbed dialogue, and major bumps and hitches in certain ambitious camera moves) don't quite damage the film's impact. Although the filmmakers' creative chutzpah clearly exceeds their budget and experience, you always see what they're trying to do, and their inventiveness brings out the viewer's charitable side.

Fusing form and content with a sureness that eludes all but a handful of first timers, Bai shapes the movie to illustrate and emphasize the creature's fragmented perceptions. He grinds the tale into jagged pieces through tight, geometrically gorgeous insert shots (a suicide is depicted in three closeups: an unfolded razor blade on a bathtub's edge, a shot of the person's placid face and an abstractly gorgeous insert of two legs lying in water that becomes cloudy with blood) and dissociating edits, including unexpected time-jumps, fades and cuts to black. We seem to be watching the experiential version of a hard drive whose contents have been corrupted.

A textbook example of overcoming poverty through ingenuity, Puzzlehead is the best low-budget sci-fi film since Greg Pak's Robot Stories. With its slow, quiet storytelling, its mythic feel and its fascination with the role playing aspects of identity-its conviction, for instance, that a father is a father because he says he is, and a son remains subordinate only as long as he accepts the father's authority-Bai's debut feature is less indebted to commercial horror cliches than to 1960s and '70s art films, like The Passenger and Persona, and modern descendants like Lost Highway and A.I. It's the first shambling step in what might be a significant career.