Filmmaker/performance artist Miranda July follows up her beloved first feature,Me and You and Everyone We Know, with an equally eccentric but darker work,The Future. Sophie (July) and Jason (Hamish Linklater,The New Adventures of Old Christine) have decided to adopt a stray cat, but the shelter won't release it for a month. So for a month, they decide to live life as if the world were about to end…  leading to quitting their jobs, door-to-door solicitation, creative confusion, adultery, conversations with the moon, and stopping time. The fracturing of Sophie and Jason's relationship is captured by such surreal means it verges into David Lynch territory. Some scenes are literally so dark it's hard to see what's happening, contributing to an unsettling emotional ambiguity. July also plays the voice of the stray cat as it waits to be rescued; its brief monologues are strikingly plaintive, in many ways more emotionally stirring than Sophie and Jason themselves. Brilliant little sequences abound; in one scene, Sophie runs into old friends and watches their reproductive lives unfold into a matter of moments.The Futureis a much more difficult movie to love thanMe and You and Everyone We Know--it's more prickly, less sweet, less naive (though still hopeful) about human relationships--but it offers many rewards for anyone who will open up to July's searching imagination.--Bret Fetzer