It’s rare that a new American film feels genuinely alive with possibility from beginning to end. So many of the logistical, economic, and technological decisions that go into making a movie in the United States are designed to suffocate artistic vision in favor of audience accessibility. Which means something infinitely strange and fractured like Slow Machine feels all the more essential, an eccentric celluloid shape-shifter shot on 16mm that playfully upends the tropes of narrative storytelling.

Paul Felten and Joe DeNardo’s low-fi genre buster follows Stephanie (Stephanie Hayes), a Swedish, Brooklyn-based actress of experimental theater who meets a mysterious government agent named Gerard (Scott Sheperd). Instead of being thrown into a world of intrigue and clandestine operations, Stephanie must endure Gerard’s casual seductions and awkward theorizing, much of which revolves around his unseen fiancé’s thesis on narrative archetypes in pornography.

Their interactions are depicted mostly in flashback,...