The Tracey Fragments is a film that gets right inside the mind of an adolescent girl.

Why you'd want to go in there in the first place remains a mystery.

Shown almost entirely in split-screen frames, The Tracey Fragments finds a bullied teen (Ellen Page) wandering the mean streets of Winnipeg.

Tracey is looking for her missing little brother, Sonny. Sonny thinks he's a dog, but that's another story.

Tracey introduces herself as, "Just a normal 15-year-old girl who hates herself."

As the images move about in a multi-split-screen style, bits of Tracey's life and experience are revealed. Fact and fantasy are all mixed up.

Here, for example, are her parents, nearly unconscious in their ignorance, and here is her useless psychiatrist, Dr. Heker (Julian Richings, playing a woman for reasons that escape us).

Here is the rock-star boy (Slim Twig) she adores. Here is the dreaded Lance (Max McCabe-Lokos) from Toronto. He takes Tracey to a terrible strip bar full of old drunks. He brings a crow into the squat where he lives.

Tracey, meanwhile, searches and searches for her little brother, filling in the blanks of her life as she talks.

All the while, as images appear, disappear, repeat themselves and add up to something else, Tracey continues to think out loud.

"How do you know what's real and what's not when the whole world is inside your head?" she wonders.

The Tracey Fragments is to a regular movie what a kaleidoscope is to an ordinary spyglass, and not always in a good way.

The storytelling eventually gets bogged down in its own fancy footwork, leaving a viewer to wonder why everything was laid out in such a complex way.

The Tracey Fragments appears to be a familiar and heartbreaking story of adolescence; Tracey is neither fish nor flesh nor fowl, and though in many ways still a child, she must cope in an adult world. Her life is splintered, her psychological state fragmented -- and so is the manner in which her tale is told.

It's tricky and flashy and initially fascinating, but for this viewer, it eventually became annoying.

To find out how her brother Sonny disappeared or how Tracey ends up wrapped in a shower curtain in the back of a city bus is convoluted and mysterious.

The Tracey Fragments is an interesting experiment. Just know going in that you have to be ready to engage in a way that's quite different from passive moviegoing.

(This film is rated 14-A)
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