Four Eyed Monsters

An uber-modern romance story that's powered with raw honesty and coated with wild imagination.

Novice filmmakers Arin Crumley and Susan Buice's charming homemade movie is a surprisingly successful experiment in collaborative creativity that sprang from a larger artistic project: their own real-life relationship.

This innovative chronicle of a truly modern romance also conveys, in a painful, darkly humorous way, a variety of ultra-identifiable truths, including the loneliness often suffered by big-city inhabitants and the complexities of sexual intimacy.

Fortunately, these artists know how to tap in to the universal longing for acceptance, making for a fresh, witty, and contemporary take on the perennial boy-meets-girl story.

So playful and imaginative that only at the very end -- in a metafictional tag about their project's success on the festival circuit -- does its narcissism become off-putting.

Fascinating if overly self-involved Slamdance entry is among the few U.S. pics that deliberately smudges the line between non-fiction and invention as it tells how Crumley and Buice meet online and develop a relationship.