The High Cost of Living

Set in a noirish, gleaming Montreal, this handsome, captivating, well-paced and stylish film is fully realized in every aspect.

The cast is uniformly good, but Isabelle Blais especially stands out as Natalie.

Shared tragedy can bind together the most unlikely of people. Movies often make too much of that truism, but surprisingly committed performances from actors like these can still make it feel like something meaningful.

This debut feature by the Canadian director Deborah Chow is so artistically well-intentioned and earnest in its ambitions that you can almost forgive the banality of its every scene.

Although there are moments when lead thesps Zach Braff ("Scrubs", "Garden State") and Isabelle Blais just about pull off the implausible conceit, the picture still suffers from major problems of tone as well as stilted camerawork and editing.

Deborah Chow's ridiculously implausible yet still predictable tale of guilt and redemption is so bipolar in tone that when it's not a more linear rip-off of Guillermo Arriaga's grim and gritty melodramas (21 Grams, Babel), it's the kind of quirky indie romance that made Braff's name.