Starring Kathleen Munroe and Sean Clement. Unrated. Plays Sunday, May 31, and Monday and Wednesday, June 1 and 3, at the Pacific Cinémathí¨que.

Imagine this: John Lennon survived his attempted assassination in 1980 and has been living an underground life in rural Ontario.

It’s an incredibly demanding premise to try to get an audience to entertain—one that requires seamless logic and execution, and one that Peter McNamee’s low-budget faux documentary, Let Him Be , struggles to pull off. The results might entrance dreamers, but they could be the only ones.

When film student Tim (Sean Clement) receives a camera that his father bought at a rummage sale, Tim finds a tape left inside that contains footage of an old man playing guitar who is the spitting image of Lennon (albeit appropriately aged).

Tim’s fascination, abetted by conspiracy theories about Lennon’s death, rapidly snowballs into obsession. Dragging along his skeptical girlfriend and filmmaking partner, Kathleen (Kathleen Munroe), he embarks upon plans to prove that this shaggy-haired, Liverpool-accented fellow (who plays Beatleseque songs) is the real deal.

The amiable, young Mulder-and-Scully couple head for the countryside north of Toronto where his father bought the camera, and they interview locals under the pretence of filming a documentary as a means to find the whereabouts of the potential Beatle.

Tech-wise, it’s a much more sophisticated Blair Witch Project . Conveniently, Tim outfits his apartment, car, and motel room with surveillance cameras as part of one of his previous ideas to document his own life. Coverage compiled from these cameras, in addition to numerous others, provide the material that McNamee deftly assembles into a cohesive narrative.

As Tim resorts to more and more extreme measures to obtain proof, and his relationship with Kathleen becomes increasingly strained, his actions provoke questions (sometimes literally voiced by Kathleen) about the invasion of privacy and the impact of filmmaking on its subjects, all topical issues in our era of ubiquitous recording devices, pervasive celebrity culture, and reality TV.

Yet although these issues are raised, they aren’t followed through to any point of satisfaction. More problematic are the attempts to rationalize Lennon’s existence that raise as many questions as they answer them.

Complicating matters are other weaknesses: uneven performances, unclear decision-making by the characters (for example, after finding out where the guy lives, the filmmaking couple abruptly head off, without explanation, to interview other townspeople), and unconvincing dialogue, all of which undermine the film’s ability to give suspension of disbelief enough of a fighting chance.