Psychosis wants to be a mindbending ‘90s indie film that wants to be a ‘50s noir. The protagonist, Cliff Van Aarle, is a fixer for hire who hears voices—his own subconscious, part of which serves as a kind of hardboiled narrator—as a result of mind-altering experiments conducted by his father. His psychosis doubles as psychic superpower and, along with copious pours of black coffee, helps him make his way through the criminal underworld.

Van Aarle is hired by a pair of drug dealers who have been assaulted by “zombies” after stealing a mysterious underlord’s secret recipe. He specializes in this sort of work, and traces the bizarre trail of clues back to Joubini, an even more powerful psychic with ties to Van Aarle’s own past. None of this is strictly coherent as it unfolds, nor is it meant to be. The film’s style mimics the sleep deprived, caffeine riddled, hallucinatory, and half-hypnotized mental state of its protagonist.

The results are uneven, and ironically for such a low budget effort, it’s most effective in its moments of purest action. A combination of eccentric angles and camera tricks with clever lighting and editing make for some genuinely exciting fight sequences where the audience experiences the same adrenaline-fueled confusion as the characters. When the film is quieter and sustained by its ideas and screenplay, it’s less effective. Most of the characters fail to rise beyond archetypes or comic bits: the drug dealer who fancies himself an entrepreneur and uses business school lingo, the costumed vigilante. The villain wears a mask, speaks in a distorted voice, and messes with his patients’s minds–a barely veiled copy of Scarecrow.

Psychosis raises questions of family trauma, mental health, and drug addiction, but has little interest in exploring these themes. It knows the aesthetic it wants to achieve, and employs half-baked ideas toward that end, but it’s not original enough to be satisfying as pure entertainment. This might make some audiences happy who are nostalgic for Pi or Memento, and sporadically entertain the rest of us, but as a complete work it fails to live up to its best moments.