As authentically indie as you can get, James Bai’s bottom-budget Puzzlehead has only its ideas and a speculative frisson to sell it. It’s a post-apocalyptic, AI melodrama because the narration says it is, using, à la Alphaville, the more barren and anonymous stretches of Brooklyn as a lawless wasteland and focusing on an eccentric scientist (Stephen Galaida) who uses illegal technology and his own “synaptic map” to build an android that looks just like him. The narration belongs to the robot (Galaida, without a beard and glasses), whose poetic ruminations about human life as he’ll never know it go a long way toward supporting the film’s otherwise shaky legs. Puzzlehead is actually about love — creator and creation struggle for power and pass for each other to a shell-shocked shopgirl. Shot on 16mm and hampered by stiff dialogue woodenly post-dubbed, Bai’s movie deserved a real budget, and deserves eyes now.
