The Cloud Of Unknowing

Photographer-turned-filmmaker Richard Sylvarnes' first feature is a delicate watercolor dream of a ghost story, as insubstantial and tremulously haunting as an unquiet spirit. Set in New York City and shot on digital video, the film's smudged, ethereal look is by turns limpidly beautiful and gently eerie. Dr. John Bennett (D.J. Mendel) drifts through his own life like a phantom, tormented by memories of his wife's death three years earlier, cloistering himself in his lab and ignoring the tentative advances of his colleague, Dr. Larson (Lisa Walter). Larson, meanwhile, is frustrated by a new patient, a silent woman (Miho Nikaido) pulled from the river after an appare...