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Verdict: A minor film in a minor key.

Details: Starring Mary-Louise Parker and Pascale Bussieres. Rated R for sexual content and language. 1 hour, 45 minutes.

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Review: "The Five Senses" is a minor film in a minor key. Its elegance, opacity and glacial pacing are the sort of affectations that give art movies a bad name. It wants to put us through an emotional wringer but its bleak ambiguity keeps us at arm's length.

That said, Jeremy Podeswa's Canadian drama isn't totally benumbing. But getting to its cathartic conclusion, a blossom of character resolutions, isn't quite worth the slog.

Podeswa isn't half the artist countryman Atom Egoyan is, so it's unfortunate he strives for the same cryptic air of cultivated mystery Egoyan ably invokes. As in Egoyan's acrostic narratives --plots seem driven by some phantom drama--, several lives converge obliquely and the noise of their impact might only be heard by dogs.

Per the title, each character is assigned a symbolic sense: An eye doctor is losing his hearing, a lovelorn gay man can "smell" love, a masseuse feels her clients' pain, etc. These casualties are given grim life by exceptional small-scale performances from a fine-tuned cast. But the writing does them in, leaving them shadows that blend into the film's autumnal gray.

For all its emphasis on feelings, "Five Senses" is an emotionally muted experience. Even when something good happens to a character, the film never stops mourning.

— Chris Garcia, Cox News Service

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