REW FFWD

As Denis Villeneuve's first crack at filmmaking, "RWD FFWd" is pretty damn good. It isn't coherent or logical, but it works if you meet the film on its own weird, disjointed level.

Its story -- if one can call it that -- is fractured, both by design and by the way it's told. The narrative is told from the perspective of the "black box" of memory, and the events unfold as if your uncle sat on the remote control while the film was playing and the movie is skipping or rewinding through entire sequences and scenes.

The story we are provided with, therefore, is broken twofold. Once by Villeneuve's writing and another time by his editing. Yet the film recalls "Memento" in that Villeneuve gives us a narrator, Lorne Brass, to explain the madness.

The narrative style may alienate some, as might the precise, directorial voice-over from Brass, but the rambling story and the poetic execution of its Jamaican- documentary premise is worth investigating. It's only 30 minutes, after all. But what an enigmatic thrill those 30 minutes are.