'The Future,' inside and out

With the release of her second feature, "The Future," the not-quite-experimental moviemaker and performance artist Miranda July has been referred to in certain quarters with terms usually reserved for pandemics. Or dismissed as intolerably annoying. This, in a world that celebrates the Kardashians.

Certainly, July is many things, including quirky, zany and all the tired adjectives that hipster critics use when they can't summon the energy to contend with work that contains real ideas. Or that demands a genuine emotional response. Which is ironic because within its small domestic drama, "The Future" demolishes contemporary mores in terms so infantilized they mock the arrested adolescence of so many so-called adults, and the culture that enables them.

The first voice is of an injured cat, Paw Paw (voice of July), awaiting adoption by Sophie (July) and Jason (Hamish Linklater). The voice is cloyingly childlike, but Paw Paw describes life "outside" in terms of terror, death and timelessness.

Paw Paw's impending arrival throws Sophie and Jason for a loop: They're 35 and the cat could live five more years, by which time they'll be 40, and life will be meaningless. (This is satire, by the way.) While Paw Paw relishes life indoors, Sophie and Jason decide to venture "outside," where they've never been, thanks to their laptops, self-absorption and devotion to each other.

It doesn't take long for the world to upset their equilibrium. Sophie has an affair with a middle-age suburbanite (David Warshofsky), Jason joins the eco-movement. As they wait out fate, magical realism calls: Jason stops time; Sophie's favorite T-shirt crawls after her on its own. For all July's supposed "quirks," she is making a rather steel-eyed assessment of the modern condition, and swaddling it in baby clothes -- a cutting critique, in and of itself.