Starring Marlee Matlin and Barry Newman. Rated PG.

It's hard to avoid putting up some defences when approaching What The Bleep Do We Know!?. Already a word-of-mouth art-house phenomenon stateside, a recent distribution deal threatens to make it the metaphysical equivalent of The Blair Witch Project. Outside Tinseltown last Thursday night, a ragtag group of seekers eagerly awaited the Big Answers. Would there be a recruitment call for Scientology? Was a Heaven's Gate--style group behind this cult film? And if so, do I get to keep the purple robe?

Thankfully, the event was robe-free and light on the messiahs. In fact, What The Bleep Do We Know!? presents unfamiliar questions about who we are, what we see, and why we're here. Directed by the team of Mark Vicente, William Arntz, and Betsy Chasse--she was on hand to introduce the film--it was also funded by Arntz, a new-age financier who made a fortune in Silicon Valley before developing an interest in leading-edge science and spiritual inquiry.

Quantum mechanics deals with the idea that what we see is changed by our perception of it, and although the film opens some doors of perception, it leaves others curiously inaccessible. The posters promise to take viewers "down the rabbit hole", but the filmmakers deliver an oddly fractured effort, or, more accurately, two films in one.

One is a traditional narrative starring a wincing--yet convincing--Marlee Matlin as Amanda, an emotionally wounded photographer working in Portland, Oregon. Her story (she's addicted to anxiety meds after a painful marital breakup) is intercut with interviews featuring real-life experts who are left unidentified, frustratingly, until the film's final sequence.

We're left spinning around the punch bowl of life, wondering what the bleep the film itself is trying to say. Ultimately, in attempting to educate and dumb down at the same time, the filmmakers fail to give their big science the pop push they intended. And there's a built-in caveat to on-screen metaphysics: if we cannot understand what we cannot see, as What the Bleep asserts, then how can any mere movie deliver the goods?

That this thing is touching a nerve with the public says a lot about our postmillennial condition. Artifacts like Fahrenheit 9/11 and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind reflect a hunger for honest answers in dark times--or at least for better questions.