Dot the I

Dot the I begins with a beautiful and willful (but also vulnerable) Spanish immigrant to London (Natalia Verbeke) accepting the proposal of her sweet, adoring English boyfriend (James D'Arcy), and then being knocked for a loop by a kiss from a stranger (Gael Garcia Bernal) at her bachelorette party. This lyrical kiss beautifully lingers--the outside world is shut out for a spellbinding moment--and the emotional complications of the resulting love triangle are engrossing and deeply heartfelt, with Verbeke giving a particularly spirited yet stormy performance. Writer-director Matthew Parkhill creatively mixes film and low-end digital video to provide a first-person immediacy that veers between being sweetly romantic and a little creepy. But he thinks himself too clever by half, and when Dot the I takes a wild and ambitious left turn, it begins to fall apart, weakened by plot holes that undermine sympathy for every character while revealing an utterly convoluted scheme that is dependent upon an impossible string of coincidences. Parkhill deserves admiration for audacity, but while his filmmaking is hypnotic throughout, the increasingly nonsensical manipulations doom the film to being little more than a deftly-made blunder. Not a necessary purchase. (R. Blackwelder)