It's very much like what happens in Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy, except that in Kiarostami's film, even the audience doesn't know where the fantasy begins and ends for the central couple. The characters there are exploring a complicated philosophical question that's openly left for the viewers to answer. Complete Unknown's version of the same idea is smaller and simpler. Jenny gently shows Tom a feeling she's failed to communicate in words, and he responds by falling for the seductive side of lying to strangers. As with Certified Copy, the audience is drawn in by the difference between a lecture about someone's abstract beliefs, and the reality of how those beliefs interact with the world.

The film spends too much time dancing around its most intriguing truths

As quiet and understated as the sequence with Bates and Glover is, it's still electric, full of undercurrents, secret understandings, and sublimated negotiations. But it's a long, unsteady haul to get to that sequence. Some of the film's trivial details about Tom's job, or the tensions between him and his wife Ramina (Azita Ghanizada), are necessary to understand the complicated push and pull going on between Tom and Jenny. But too much of the film feels like white noise and filler. Marston is working in English for the first time after his well-received features Maria Full Of Grace (in Spanish) and The Forgiveness Of Blood (in Albanian), but the banality of the dialogue in the film's first half makes his words seem wasted in any language. So much of the film dances around the truth about who Jenny is, and why she's chosen the methods that define her life. But the extended coyness doesn't create a compelling mystery. It just delays forward momentum, stalling the film as it lurches toward the significant part of the story.

And the framing for that central scene keeps detracting from Marston's attempts to balance Tom and Jenny's viewpoints. Jenny gets access to Tom's birthday party by luring his co-worker Clyde (Michael Chernus) into the beginnings of a relationship, then ignoring him once she has her foot in Tom's door. It's an unnecessary pretense that highlights her complete lack of empathy, and her willingness to take advantage of people, even using them as props. And the flubs she makes with Tom's friends — one of whom sees through her from the start — raise the question of how good she really is at fabrication, and how she maintained any of her identities as the lies built up. Meanwhile, Tom's brittleness and shrillness with Ramina doesn't speak well to the stability he's trying to preserve. They both come across as poor representatives for the lifestyles they're espousing, and the film's unwillingness to pick a side leaves it without a point of view or a sense of focus.