Picking and choosing what to see in an already clogged film season is all about priorities. If you know a critical darling like Brokeback Mountainwill be around for a long, long while (I waited weeks to see Brokeback for fear of being killed in a deadly art-house stampede) then it’s better to forgo the long lines and sold-out shows to catch something that will likely be gone in the blink of an eye.

Using this logic, I barely blinked in the face of the praised-beyond-relevance hype machines and caught Michael Almereyda’s Happy Here and Now. Set in pre-Katrina New Orleans in “The Future,” but shot back in 2001, Happy Here and Now is from a time indefinite where the only seemingly technological advancement is a computer program that allows people to assume an alternate identity and project it onto the internet in real-time video. A mysterious film disguised as a mystery, the “story” revolves around a young woman named Amelia (Liane Balaban) who comes to New Orleans to find her missing sister, Muriel (Shalom Harlow). The only trace of Muriel is a hard drive that’s been wiped clean, so with the help of her aunt Lois (Ally Sheedy) and Lois’s boyfriend Bill (Clarence Williams III), Amelia uncovers instant-message video chats with a mysterious man named Eddie Mars (Karl Geary). Amelia contacts Eddie but soon discovers his identity is not what it seems.

Happy Here and Nowis ultimately about isolation and the fear of and desire to understand and be understood. Almereyda’s New Orleanians attempt connection through the ghostly medium of the Internet without realizing the depth of their connections in their everyday lives. The greater mystery lying at the heart of the film is why we want to escape ourselves and can technology, which is never really happy here and now, provide that escape? The further we descend into avatars, the more we disappear. But never completely. Traces of ourselves can be found even in a wiped-out computer hard drive, or perhaps a toy bunny (Amelia uses one that mimics her movements as her avatar). At the end, there is no clear resolution. We see Muriel in an airport, but is she coming home or traveling somewhere else or is it simply the past we’re seeing? A resolution is finite and the characters in Happy Here and Now are constantly evolving and changing. In fact, the last line of the film is “now.” As the enigmatic Eddie Mars proclaims, “If there was a point, there wouldn’t be a story.” In Happy Here and Now, the future is now.