Directed by Eric Hueber, Flutter follows JoLynn (Lindsay Pulsipher), a single mother left to care for her son Johnathan, who is suffering from a severe case of glaucoma. Life isn’t made any easier for JoLynn when she realizes she is running out of money, with her only source of aid coming from absent husband’s parents.

Flutter initially appears to be an examination of a struggling parent. JoLynn gives her son cannabis rather than his prescribed medicine, lives in appalling conditions, has no electricity, and occasionally allows her son to share his bedroom with a fully sized pig named Wee Wee, who also happens to be his best and only friend. Meanwhile, her husband David, a musician, has decided to tour the country, leaving his family to fend for themselves. It’s not surprising that Johnathan’s grandparents desperately want Johnathan to come and live with them, and Glen Morshower is on top form as the pained grandfather Mark, who’s clearly conflicted over his affection for JoLynn and concern for his grandson. On the other hand, Johnathan’s grandmother Linda is less concerned with revealing her true feelings about JoLynn, but Mark holds her back from doing so.

Despite the serious plot, Flutter is not a sobering portrayal of parental abuse, but rather a determinedly optimistic film striving to convey the strength of the relationship between a mother and son. JoLynn’s apparent lack of hope without a man in her life may feel like a plot point designed to aggravate feminists, yet JoLynn is one of the strongest characters in the film. And while Mark may be more rational than JoLynn, he has also trapped himself in an unhappy marriage. JoLynn’s world may be collapsing around her, but she never gives in to depression. She is determined to make her son happy, and give him the best life she can. This central message of the film is bolstered by a captivating performance from Lindsay Pulsipher, who conveys a great deal of love and pain with very little dialogue. Pulsipher steals every scene she is in despite being surrounded by a talented cast including Morshower and Charles Halford, who puts in a stirring performance as JoLynn’s pot smoking friend and confidant.

However, Flutter’s inherent sense of optimism does occasionally verge on twee, and this is where the film suffers. Hueber, for example, treats us to a number of animated sequences involving Johnathan fighting sea monsters. These scenes feel underdeveloped, never really giving much insight into Johnathan’s character until they’re lumped into a rather laboured metaphor at the end. This clashes with the powerful realism of the film, and it feels like Hueber is trying too hard to be cutesy when he is more at home with gritty material. And scenes involving JoLynn’s husband David singing whispery blues over a whimsical montage lack the same subtlety as the rest of the film. This is especially frustrating, since Pulsipher’s performance elicits all the emotion it needs without Hueber having to rely on manufactured emotional poignancy to get his message across.

Flutter may have its shortcomings, but its strengths outweigh its flaws. It’s a confident film from Hueber, and in Pulsipher he has truly found a fantastic actress, whose performance here ought to see her receive more leading roles in the future.

Flutter is available now on VOD.

Nystagmus is a disease that you probably haven’t heard of. But the rare eye disorder–coupled with glaucoma–is the jumping off point for the new mother/son relationship drama, Flutter.

The film follows JoLynn (Lindsay Pulsipher of True Blood), a young, semi-single mother struggling to raise her son, Johnathan (Johnathan Huth Jr.), a sea monster-obsessed nine-year-old with a pair of rare eye disorders. To relieve her son of his pain, JoLynn grows and cooks marijuana into edible “medicine.” To take things from bad to worse, JoLynn’s in-laws decide that they can care for Johnathan better and attempt to seek custody.

Written and directed by first-timer Eric Hueber, Flutter is rounded out by several Friday Night Lights alums: Glenn Morshower, Jesse Plemons, and Brad Leland.

The film hits digital and on demand on April 7, and to tide you over until then, we have an exclusive clip that highlights JoLynn’s resigned determination to care for her son her own way.

Exclusive Clip for Flutter

Anyone able to withstand the visual and aural assault of The Oregonian will find plenty more to like in Calvin Lee Reeder’s follow-up. Reeder, who tends to prefer a bombardment of surreal imagery over narrative, has a unique style that makes it hard to find any contemporaries similar to him. The closest might be Quentin Dupieux, a director whose bizarre stories have enough self-awareness to make their pointlessness enjoyable. Reeder, on the other hand, seems to take himself too seriously, an issue that sums up everything that’s wrong with The Rambler. It’s not so much singular as it is singularly bad.

The title character (Dermot Mulroney), returning home after a long stint at prison, doesn’t take long to get out of town. His long-term girlfriend (Natasha Lyonne) tells him she’s pregnant with someone else’s child, and the boss at his new job spends most of her time berating him. The man’s brother offers him work at a ranch in Oregon, setting off a cross-country journey that makes no sense whatsoever. The cast of characters Mulroney’s rambler encounters include a doctor whose dream recording machine blows up people’s heads, a taxi driver with a fetish for wounded women, and a romantic interest (Lindsay Pulsipher) who repeatedly dies.

Any attempts to make sense out of The Rambler are a waste of time, as Reeder throws up everything he can think of at the screen that will unsettle viewers. Some of these elements feel derivative on their own, while most of them are amateurish at best. The use of stock sound effects, radio static jump cuts and abundant gore give a cheap, amateur quality to the film that makes it more laughably bad than legitimately disturbing. What The Rambler amounts to is a series of boring vignettes, and when Mulroney’s character predictably abandons his “normal” brother after arriving it turns into an incomprehensible and annoying curiosity.

There’s still something to admire about Reeder’s direction. As bad as it can be, he clearly has a specific vision in mind that he carries out to what appears to be the best of his abilities, even if it fails at what it tries to do. Weirdness for its own sake isn’t a bad thing, but it has to have some sort of entertainment value if it wants to succeed. The Rambler is missing that quality, and as a result it suffers immensely. It’s a head-scratcher of a film, but only in that it’ll have you wondering how it got made in the first place.