The surreal, virtually non-narrative first feature from filmmaker Michelange Quay, Eat, For This is My Body is the rare Sundance title that unquestionably bears the mark of an obstinately independent vision. It’s by turns exhilarating and totally confounding, and it’s certainly not always successful, but it is always a challenge, and for that alone it pops out of the pack. It’s also incredible to look at. The opening series of arial sweeps across Haiti, from postcard-perfect coastline to inland slums to desolate mountain terrain, is absolutely breathtaking.

The film begins and ends with slow, deliberate montages depicting contemporary Haitian life, from a sea of black faces in a marketplace to a pregnant woman sweating in a slum, to a late night dance party. It looks like ethnography, the nameless subjects eyeing the camera with suspicion, and it’s clearly delineated from the main section of the film, which takes place in a massive mansion, home to a middle-aged white woman, her aging, ailing mother, and their black servant.

It’s in this section that the film settles into a series of dreamlike tableau, designed to illustrate the relationship between colonizer and colonized, a loosely-woven series of discreet moving paintings about the dynamics of difference. Some of these scenes and setups are more conceptually effective than others, but even those that miss their mark on a theoretic level are impressive as pure images. Imagine if David Lynch suddenly became interested in the interplay of race and power, and you’re almost there; much like Inland Empire, Eat’s blend of surreal, almost dialogue-free humor and painterly obfuscation remains compelling, even when what’s on the screen seems to drift further and further away from a discernible relationship to a concrete idea.

The film literally reduces its concerns to black and white–as in race, as in design elements, as in binary oppositions. Of course, this is a pretty reductive way to talk about how humans behave, and it’s the main reason why in practice, Eat feels more like fine art than film. It’s not on Quay’s agenda to assign his characters the kind of depth that would make us care about them as people, but I’m fairly certain it’s not because he’s just being shallow; the entire conceit of the thing wouldn’t work unless his actors were playing roles, ciphers, stereotypes, instead of living-breathing humans. Your mileage with this will vary; for me, there’s something exciting about the anarchy of non-characters in a non-narrative, but in the end, it does feel a little cold, and when Quay’s more obscure visual metaphors fall flat, it’s frustrating.

The entire middle section of Eat, encased in the cool bubble of that mansion, and in sharp contrast to the corporeal realism that comes before and after, appears to be a prolonged fantasy. But whose fantasy? Unwilling to let us lazily cash in on met expectations, Quay subtly shifts the perspective from scene to scene. The best example of this tactic plays out over two remarkable scenes early in the mansion section. In the first, the middle aged white woman sits at a round dinner table, surrounded by ten or twelve black school boys, dressed in identical suits. She essentially coaches them to thank her over and over again for a meal that she refused to give them. This clearly seems to be from the point of view of the colonized. But then, a few scenes later, we cut to just the boys, seated around a smaller table. The white woman has been replaced by a gooey, vanilla-iced white cake. To describe what happens next in too much detail would be to take away the pleasure/agony of watching it slowly unfold, but suffice it to say that the big white confection coaxes out the boys’ baser instincts. This is either the colonizer’s fantasy/worst nightmare, or it’s the colonized’s projection of their impression of the colonizer’s impression of their true nature. Or maybe a little of both. I think.

Puzzling this part out would surely require repeated viewings, but it may be a wasted effort. The best of Eat, For This is My Body runs on a pure, Buneulian absurdity, which has its charms regardless of whether or not Quay’s political/theoretical intentions are fully received.

Eat, For This is My Body is screening at the Sundance Film Festival in the New Frontiers section tomorrow, Tuesday and Wednesday. More info