Starring Courteney Cox and James LeGros. Rating unavailable.

November is the second directing-and-editing feature for Greg Harrison, who did the rave movie Groove, and it compresses prismatic shards of memory, voyeurism, and paranoia into a small time span, presenting the same basic events repeatedly but with twists each time. Rather than taking a Rashomon approach, with each witness recalling different perceptions of the same crime, November sticks to the shifting perceptions of one decidedly unstable woman.

Courteney Cox, hiding behind boxy grey suits and Lisa Loeb glasses, plays Sophie, a photography teacher haunted by the recent death of her boyfriend (James LeGros), the victim of a convenience-store robbery gone awful. Multiple visits-or are they the same visits?-with her dispassionate therapist (Nora Dunn) and socialite mother (Anne Archer) only seem to make things more confusing. Apparently, Sophie had been flinging with a colleague (Michael Ealy) just before the incident, so guilt and migraine headaches also play starring roles in her ongoing nightmare.

As a filmmaker, Harrison perhaps pays more attention to the atmospherics than the story. With lots of fast, Darren Aronofsky-like cutting between grotesque images and disorienting close-ups over a spooky, minimalist score, November is as unnerving as anything in a Japanese horror movie. This front-loaded approach is acknowledged in the frequently clever dialogue from screenwriter Benjamin Brand. In one scene, a gruff detective (Nick Offerman), in an attempt to find more evidence on the scene, looks over some of her pictures and pronounces them "almost too arty for their own good".

The same can be said of the movie itself. If Cox were a livelier presence, we might get more reward for all the messy onion-skin peeling. But the film's cool detachment is also a kind of strength. It's named after a long, cold month that doesn't even offer the consolation of Christmas. And, at least for more charitable viewers, it ends with the sense that winter is worth surviving.