We’ve seen The Future, and it’s cute. But also a little dark. If you were taken with Miranda July’s first film, Me and You and Everyone We Know, you’ll be shitting home-baked cookies over her latest and somewhat more melancholy creation.

Known originally as a performance artist, July is a wildly talented creature, and something of a goddess to a certain Etsy-perusing Main Street type. Others might be a little aggravated by a film that puts a couple of relentlessly lovable white people through the wringer, thanks to a talking cat.

But wait! There’s no arguing with the success of July’s vision in The Future, in which she also stars as the lost Sophie. When Paw-Paw the cat enters the lives of Sophie and her partner, Jason (Hamish Linklater), they drop everything (including the Internet—aargh!) to follow their long-shelved dreams. But there’s an ambivalence to the outcome, even for Paw-Paw. Especially for Paw-Paw.

“I know,” July tells the Georgia Straight, with a sigh, from her hotel room in Toronto. “It’s a mixed bag for cat lovers, for sure. Paw-Paw really is sort of the moral soul of the movie. He’s not taken lightly.”

Part of the film’s effect comes from its weird balance of post-ironic humour and sadness. Sophie performs an oddly moving dance scene in one key moment, disappearing inside an endlessly elastic shirt (aka “shirty”) that actually follows her on her unlikely journey into a tryst with a middle-aged dad. It must have been a bitch to shoot.

“We did it in a couple takes,” July says, “but it was totally impossible, because I can’t see, and it’s not good when the director is literally blind. I think when it was rehearsed, there was more light in the room, which allowed me to see shadows. But then the lighting when we shot was darker, so I remember calling out occasionally, going, ‘Where’s the camera? Just yell, so I know which side of the room!’ It was like pin the tail on the donkey or something, just being so lost.”

Jason, meanwhile, drifts into the strange world of a soft-voiced senior named Joe (Joe Putterlik). And here is where The Future becomes something quite special, not least of all because Putterlik wasn’t an actor. July met him through an unrelated project.

“Initially, I was just, like, ‘God, real life is so much more interesting,’ ” she says. “And I kind of felt dumb. ‘Here I am writing this stupid movie, always making these less-interesting characters,’ and I was, like, ‘Well, I can either write a character like him and cast an actor, or he can just be in the movie maybe.’ ”

It turned out that Putterlik was the rare type who “didn’t change at all” in the presence of a camera. Indeed, his indifference to the process actually registers on film, throwing the self-absorbed anguish of the leads into very sharp relief.

“Keep in mind he hadn’t gone to the movies since 1969,” July says. “He’s Depression era, very thrifty, certainly no computer. He was aware of [making the movie], he just wasn’t all that interested. It wasn’t that pertinent to his world. Which was kind of great. To realize this was not the biggest, most amazing thing to happen to this person. This is one thing in an interesting life.”

Watch the trailer for The Future.