Acidman

 Maggie (Dianna Agron) hasn't seen her deadbeat dad since he abandoned his family when she was little. As the film begins, she's finally managed to track him down to a remote house in the middle of a gorgeous stretch of wilderness. The word 'ACIDMAN' is crudely graffitied across the facade... sort of functioning as the title card. Cute.

 The scrawl refers, of course, to her father Lloyd - a very gruff, ornery Thomas Haden Church, who after some desultory pleasantries asks how long she's planning on staying. Clearly hoping it won't be long. 

 But she persists, and after a while, he opens up, a little: he's basically not been up to much. Composes beats for a hobby, has frequent fugue states he doesn't consider serious enough to merit medical attention, and... oh, yeah, he's made it his life's work to communicate with some mysterious lights in the sky he's been observing for the past few years.

 The lights are real - Maggie confirms as much, but they're left unexplained. Acidman is your basic quiet indie drama, and the chances that they'll ever turn out to be much more than a metaphor for Maggie's attempt to reconnect with him are about as likely as him becoming an overnight celebrity for his beats with Maggie as his producer.

 No, not much happens beyond two people slowly opening up to each other. And maybe that's for the best - the film's most dramatic incident, while affecting and serving a plot function, is a very, very cheap shot that almost soured me on the whole enterprise. Not the least because it's very easy to see coming.

 Aside from that, it's well made. It's not like we're lacking for these sort of stories, but scriptwriters Chris Dowling and Alex Lehmann have created two worthwhile, complex characters that are fun to watch bouncing off each other, and handle their interactions with grace and realism. Just as importantly, both Agron and Church deliver two great performances - Church is particularly great at making his character's kookiness feel natural.

 Alex Lehman's unfussy direction means that there's not much style on display, just your standard indie handheld shots, but it's cut with loads of beautiful wilderness footage (cinematographer: John Matysiak). The soundtrack by Christopher French is the requisite pleasant synths with the occasional piano plink, but the film is just as happy to let the busy quietness of the great outdoors - wind, flapping clothes, the whispering of the trees - take up long stretches of the film, giving it a little more personality that it would otherwise have.

 The conflict at the root of the story is mundane, trivial even - but I found it engaging: a variation on the old 'am I broken?' type of insecurity we see so often in this sort of thing, but done well enough to justify its existence.