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What The H?

If you're looking for a coherent sci-fi film, look elsewhere. If you're looking for a sci-fi film that is beautifully executed despite being made on a shoe-string budget, Rania Attieh and Daniel Garcia's "H." is the right thing for you. It will leave you with unanswered questions when the credits roll, so you'll be forced to use your imagination, something that can sometimes be a plus. Everything doesn't always have to be explained to the audience for a story to work.

Two women named Helen who don't know each other and who both live in Troy, NY - an obvious Helen of Troy reference - are going through bizarre experiences, along with some of Troy's other citizens. Helen (Robin Bartlett} is a woman of about 60 who lives with her husband and her reborn baby doll. Exactly what a reborn baby doll is never made entirely clear. What we do know is that it is incredibly lifelike and that she treats it like a real infant, even breastfeeding it.

The other Helen (Rebecca Dayan) is in her thirties. She has a successful art career, lives with her husband, and is four months pregnant. The younger Helen doesn't appear to be as odd as the elder Helen, at least not at first glance.

Everything goes from odd to extremely bizarre when a large unidentifiable object crashes into the local river. It looks like a boulder of sorts, but it moves around the water as if under some sort of power. Other unexplainable things also begin to occur, like the clouds all looking identical and being equidistant from each other. Some of the people in Troy face walls and go catatonic for brief periods. Others go missing, entirely.

Some of it gets explained. At least partially. Much of it is left unexplained, which might bother some viewers, but others, like myself, will not care. That's because Attieh and Garcia do a great job of making the journey the point, rather than depending on a splashy ending to tie it all up in a pretty little bow. This journey is worth undertaking and it will allow you to wonder what really happened, and that can make you think after you exit, and that's not a bad thing.