Adapted from Jordan Harrison’s well-received 2015 off-Broadway play of the same name by director Michael Almereyda, the micro-budget, special effects-resistant science fiction film Marjorie Prime is very much a chamber piece with flashes of cinematic brilliance. Almereyda leans in to the dialogue-heavy nature of this tone poem on loss, remembrance, and the loss of remembrance. He’s also assembled a cast that commands attention. Lois Smith is remarkable as octogenarian Marjorie, a woman in failing health whose son-in-law, Jon (Tim Robbins), has purchased a holographic companion for her. Fed enough information, this projection will eventually learn to respond as if it were a specific person—and for Marjorie, that means he appears as the younger version of her late husband, Walter.

So that’s how Jon Hamm, acting a little bit like Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation, ends up on her couch, not quite knowing the details of which pet died when, or if their pivotal date was to a revival of Casablanca or a first-run of My Best Friend’s Wedding. (Someone will eventually connect the dots and determine when, exactly, this movie takes place. Suffice it to say, it’s far enough into the future that beach- house windows let in only crisp light.)

Also in the mix, and stealing every scene, is Geena Davis as Marjorie and Walter’s daughter, Tess. Only through a series of somewhat detached conversations are we able patch together some of the lingering resentments within the family, but not quite knowing the details is part of what makes this movie tick. In a way, we in the audience are meant to identify with Hamm’s blank slate machinery, collecting morsels of information along the way.

Just when you might think to yourself “man, this really feels like a filmed-play,” Almereyda—whose work also includes the downtown chic vampire film Nadja, Stanley Milgram biopic Experimenter, the beloved modernist version of Hamlet with Ethan Hawke asking “to be or not to be?” in a Blockbuster, and a documentary about photographer William Eggleston—cracks the whip and opens up the play by transporting us to a richer interior. Images flash; long periods of time dissolve; points of view change. (Viewers who can’t handle Westworld are really going to need to hold onto the saddle here.) Occasionally, there’s a monologue in which the camera lingers on someone listening instead of talking.

All this disorientation comes with the aim of setting goalposts for some very basic questions about human existence. When we remember something, are we really recalling the event, or reflecting on the last time we thought about it? That’s a fairly dorm room-esque question, but set to an original score by Mica Levi—with an assist from Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry and The National’s Bryce Dessner's “Wave Movements Project,” a collaboration with the New York Philharmonic—instead of, say, an old Grateful Dead tape, there’s an overall aura of importance to the whole affair. The stylized look of cinematographer-of-the-moment Sean Price Williams also lends Marjorie some gravity.