Ellen Page (of Juno and Hard Candy fame) plays a fifteen year old girl named Tracey Berkowitz. When we meet her, she's sitting on the back of a bus explaining to us that she's looking for her little brother, Sonny (Zie Souwand) who went missing shortly after she hypnotized him into believing that he was a dog.

As Tracey wanders around the city trying to figure out what exactly happened to Sonny, she talks to us about her school life, her lackluster love life and whirlwind romance with Billy Zero (Slim Twig), her strange experiences with an unusual psychologist, and of course her completely dysfunctional relationship with her mother and father (Ari Cohen). The real meat of the mystery lies not in deciphering what happens to Tracey, but in figuring how much of it occurs in the literal world in contrast to the large portions which are obviously playing out only within her overactive imagination.

The Tracey Fragments is unlike any of director Bruce McDonald's feature films. It's not a road movie, there isn't much of a 'punk rock' aesthetic to it, and it lacks much of the quirky dialogue and wonky humor that made movies Hardcore Logo and Highway 61 cult classics. That said, it's a very good film, even if McDonald takes us into unfamiliar territory. If you're at all familiar with the director's better known nineties films and didn't know any better you might find yourself hard pressed to believe that this picture was made by the same man.

The visuals for this film are akin to those seen in the indy horror film Katiebird which came out on DVD through Heretic Films a couple of years ago. For those who haven't seen that film, it works like this - the more chaotic or disjointed a character's psyche becomes the more chaotic and, well, fractured, the screen is. What this means is that during calmer moments the picture will more or less fill the frame but during moments where Tracey starts to breakdown the screen could be made up of a dozen or more small images, sometimes all moving at the same time. This results in a film that's definitely not going to appeal to everyone's visual taste, and one that requires more concentration than your typical picture.

Despite the weird (you could argue 'novelty') visuals the real key to the film's success is the core performance from Academy Award nominee Ellen Page (yep, the girl from Juno). While in Diablo Cody's film she found herself spouting off completely inane hipster speak, here her Tracey talks like a normal teenage girl rather than something out of a post-Tarantino nightmare. She's completely believable here and brings with her a very sincere sense of sadness and pathos to the part that saves her character from winding up as completely pathetic. Tracey has had a rough life in some ways. She's not at all popular at school, her home life is a mess, and everyone she meets seems to be completely off their rocker - or maybe it's her? Either way, Page does a very good job with some rather tricky material.

Ultimately this film (like all movies, I suppose) will speak in different ways to different people. Depending on your own adolescent experiences and your own high school popularity rank, you may see in The Tracey Fragments a piece of yourself from years ago. The film is well directed, well written, and very well acted on the part of Ms. Page and once you get past the over the top visuals it turns out to be a completely heartfelt story that's well worth exploring and thinking over.