If you’re wondering what happens to cause the crappy year referenced in the title of director Cam Archer’s second feature film, Shit Year, you’re asking the wrong question. It’s what doesn’t happen that makes retiring actress Colleen West’s life a drag. West (Ellen Barkin) is supposed to be an accomplished veteran of stage and screen living in a Hollywood that, through cinematographer Aaron Platt’s gritty black and white photography, feels more like the wasteland of Jim Jarmusch’s 1980s Lower East Side. She has abruptly decided it is time to quit her profession.

Archer’s film possesses a narrative ambition which is more commendable than it is effective. Splitting up his story into dream-like chunks, West’s story is a scatalogical mash-up of anxiety ridden moments, which range from the quietly despondent to the frenetically exacerbated. It plays, at times, like an homage to the strained psychosis of John Cassavetes’ heroines, yet throughout there is Archer’s all-too-knowing dialogue –“I fear the end of loss;” “My whole being is pining;” “I’m surrounded by a wall of nothing” — which purports to turn his characters inside out, but read like a teenager’s diary.

If there is one good line in the film it is one that Barkin delivers while appearing at a television interview (shot in an off-putting, strangely vacant studio). “Actors take bad lines and make them interesting,” she says. It plays like dead-pan humor, an unintended moment of snarky self-deprecation. The problem is Barkin keeps looking like she is really trying to do something interesting with the poor lines Archer gives her.

There is a story in here, and we can flatten it out into something that sounds straightforward. We meet Colleen in the midst of her last production, a stage piece in which she is acting alongside Harvey (Luke Grimes), a green actor who has a young Johnny Depp meets Ralph Macchio look. Both the staged play and life outside the play develop with heaps oedipal tension between the cross-generational lovers, and Archer intercuts on and off stage moments to deliberately frustrate our sense of the “real” and the acted. Colleen falls for Harvey with infatuated abandon, girlish, though still mature, aloof, and always slightly out of Harvey’s reach. A true narcissist, she always seems to be reserving her most intimate self for herself.

Shit Year’s best scenes come when Archer isn’t trying to work too hard to make his movie look and feel avant-garde. That’s because all of his directorial games – sharp, illogical jump cuts; inserted random stock footage; extended sequences in an obscure, white-roomed sci-fi setting– only inject visual botox to plump up what is ultimately a sparse, solipsistic story. But in the long, quiet scenes, such as one in which Harvey floats in a pool chatting aimlessly with Colleen, who sits at pool’s edge, the visual tension created by the juxtaposition of these two lost souls is pure and the story simmers a bit.

While the relationship between Colleen and Harvey comprises Shit Year’s emotional core, Archer also drags us through the even more boring aftermath. Colleen is in the midst of her post-career idleness, living in a house in a remote part of the Californian countryside. There she is dangerously alone, given her melancholia (“How did this nothing become my something?”) but for a chirpy young jogger whom she bumps into on the street outside her house one morning. The neighbor, Shelley (Melora Walters) is a nerdy, sheltered housewife who gabs without listening and perpetually radiates with a forced rosiness. The two eventually bond, making dolls out of apples, as Colleen lets go of her initial cynicism and embraces the suburban housewife’s simple kindness.

Shelly’s sweetness, however, doesn’t prove sufficient to keep the nightmares away. Those are fueled by the preposterous surrealistic side story that involves Colleen’s seeking to re-encounter her lost lover, Harvey, through a virtual reality simulation. Seated at a white table in a white room with the androgynous Marion (Theresa Randle), Colleen is prodded to “breath like Harvey.” These scenes enter the storyline haphazardly and ambiguously, but as the film progresses, they begin to undermine our assumptions about the rest of the narrative. In which scenes is Harvey really Harvey, and in which is he an illusion? Some, all, none?

That this psychological double play—interwoven with an editing technique that takes advantage of cinema’s particular penchant for blurring narrative and psychological realties—is one way Shit Year misconstrues its focus. What Archer has done is built a massively complicated and beautiful visual structure around an essentially flimsy love story. From the movie’s first shots, we are moved by the grainy richness of its noir-ish, expressionistic images. But this great heaping succession of images are all we are really left with. Shit Year would perhaps work better as a photography exhibition than a film, with each meticulous and studied composition suggesting mysterious drama like a Cindy Sherman photo. But, when played back at twenty-four frames per second, the images only suppress that ever elusive drama.