"How you define the ending is how you define yourself." Well-well-well. I guess how I define myself is like this: very abrupt. That's what the ending of Iota is like. It's got the most abrupt ending since the final fade-out of John Sayles' Limbo, in which the central premise - whether or not a stranded family would make it off an island - was never resolved.

This is a very subtle, intimate film, beautifully photographed in 35mm. I found myself leaning in close to the screen, wanting to understand. I recommended cranking up the volume as far as it'll go. Otherwise you're going to miss some key elements.

The story involves either two or three characters, I'm not completely sure. On Christmas night a little girl sees something outside her window and runs away. There appears to be another girl in the room, but we can't be for certain because we never see them in the same shot. Director Simon Dennis could have solved this by including a wide shot of the room showing us whether there are one or two beds, but he seems to prefer to keep things ambiguous.

Depending on your interpretation, Iota is either about a little girl who runs away and leaves behind a sister and a father. Or it's about a little girl who gets out of bed one night, sees herself sleeping peacefully, and only a "part" of her runs away. The little girl left behind can communicate only through sign language, so it must be her voice that left. I'm inclined to think that this interpretation is the right one. "Iota" is defined as "the smallest possible amount," and this would seem to support my theory.

The remote locations and reticent characters bring to mind Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter, which is high praise indeed. The movie weaves a spell that's only occasionally broken by confusion.