Can you admire a film you can't stand?
What the F!#$ is not a movie by any familiar measure. It's a "dream-u-mentary." A "docu-dreamery." A bizarre, beautiful bore.
Part excruciating educational flick, part surreal mind trip, F!#$ posits that most of us exist only in the dimension we can see—our "waking reality"—ignoring "the quantum field hidden behind what we consider our normal world" with its infinite possibilities. It juxtaposes endless metaphysical-centric interviews with unidentified scientists, physicists and philosophers exuberantly espousing other-worldly options, with a nominal "story" about a stuck-in-a-rut shutterbug (Marlee Matlin) who gradually discovers a world she'd never before glimpsed, lurking in the subatomic particles and quantum mechanics and parallel universes surrounding us.
We're down the rabbit hole here, folks.
Superior Star Trekian graphics and cobalt-blue dissolves between "dimensional planes" are dazzling, a welcome distraction from interviewee utterances such as, "What I thought was unreal now seems to be more real than what I think to be real, which seems now more to be unreal," and, "Have you ever thought of what thoughts are made of?"
Those with a molecular-level passion for such cosmic profundity will be mesmerized. Otherwise, F!#$ hurls such a dense mélange of ideas and images and story at us in such a New Age-y orgasm of Nova-style eggheadedness crossed with skeletal dramatic skills, it's migraine-inducing.
Intellectually, you can admire it. Cinematically, can you stand it?