Synecdoche, New York

Dreams have their own logic. One minute, you could be oddly calm inside a house on fire, the next, you could be desperately searching for a missing child amid an unfamiliar landscape. Abstract chains of events make a weird sort of sense when released from the context of our everyday lives. And it is this suspension of disbelief, this innate dream reasoning, that Charlie Kaufman is banking on audiences being able to access in order to appreciate his directorial debut.

Fans of Kaufman's previous screenwriting flights of fancy like Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are by now accustomed to the non-linear, often bewildering twists inherent in the writer's wildly imaginative plots. But at the helm of Synecdoche, Kaufman pushes audiences even farther with the sort of challenging filmmaking rarely seen outside of an art house. Anchoring this darkly comic cinematic anxiety attack is Philip Seymour Hoffman, who is unforgettable as Caden Cotard, a theater director riddled with illness who seems perpetually teetering on the verge of both brilliance and extinction.

Reeling from the rapid dissolution of both his marriage and his health, Cotard is given a grant to create his magnum opus, and with the money, he sets off to create a fabricated world that bears a striking resemblance to his real life. Leaving his dreary town of Schenectady, NY, he rents a warehouse in N.Y.C., fills it with replicas of the towering buildings around him, and then fills those sets with an army of actors who attempt to embody the traumas their director perpetually suffers. As his art comes to completely envelop his life, the difference between Cotard's actual biography and the sprawling constructed one blur irrevocably, until the plot at last becomes a metaphor for itself.

At turns as neurotic and nebbishy as any Woody Allen flick, as creepy and disorienting as your favorite "Twilight Zone" episode, and as steeped in magical realism as the most moving Márquez novel, Synecdoche may not be the feel-good date movie of the year. But for viewers up for the challenge, it may be the film most likely to stick with you.