It’s hard to know what’s going on in ‘Bliss,’ which intrigues, frustrates

It’s hard to know what’s going on in ‘Bliss,’ which intrigues, frustrates

In the press notes for his new film “Bliss,” writer-director Mike Cahill calls it “a love story and an adventure story and a father-daughter story. It’s also a science-fiction movie about life inside a simulation.”

That’s probably as good and as efficient of a summary as you’re going to find for this wholly intriguing, often-engaging, sometimes-frustrating and ultimately incomplete-feeling movie that lands on Amazon’s Prime video platform this week.

Starring the appealing pair of Owen Wilson and Salma Hayek, “Bliss” is enough of an unusual cinematic journey that we want to allow it its rough patches — or at least some of them.

“I have a picture in my head of a place — home — a woman,” Wilson’s character, Greg Wittle, says in the movie’s opening narration. “I don’t know if any of it’s real, but it has a feeling — and the feeling’s real.”

So consumed with these vague memories is Greg that he’s spending all his time in his office at what appears to be a middlemanagement job — at a company called Technical

Difficulties — making sketches of them.

Cahill begins to show us all is not well — either with Greg’s mind or his world (or both) — from the start, with some visual hints but mainly through the character’s behavior. There’s also a call from his daughter, Emily (Nesta Cooper), during which we learn he is divorced from her mother but plans to be at Emily’s graduation, if not the celebratory meal afterward. Instead, he promises, he’ll take Emily and her brother out to dinner separately soon after so as not to upset their mother.

Told to report to his boss’ office immediately, Greg continues to sketch AND take the time to call a pharmacy about a refill for some pain medication he desperately wants.

He finally arrives to see his superior — after multiple phone calls insisting he do so — to be fired. Let’s just say that the meeting then takes an unusual and dramatic turn after the bad news is delivered.

Greg soon finds himself in a nearby bar, where he encounters Hayek’s Isabel Clemens. This is where “Bliss” really starts to let loose, Isabel filling Greg’s head with notions that while he and she are “real,” everyone else in the bar — and most of the people in the world — are part of a simulation. To prove this, she demonstrates she has supernatural powers allowing her to, say, make a bar patron fall down while noting Greg is immune from her abilities.

After Isabel seemingly uses otherworldly gifts to help him out of his present predicament, Greg agrees to follow her to her “home” of sorts — a spot of city land near a bridge where she has a tent and more.

From there, “Bliss” grows only weirder and wilder, Greg following Isabel on an adventure that leads to strange places — including the dream home he’s so diligently been sketching.

It’s nice to see Wilson (“The Royal Tenenbaums,” “Wedding Crashers”), who hasn’t been on the big screen much in recent years. He’s ideally cast here, as he brings his familiar calm on-screen demeanor to a character in the middle of a lot of craziness. Wilson adds some subtle touches to “Bliss,” especially late in the affair, when things are a bit clearer, if not completely clear.

Hayek (“Frida,” “Like a Boss”) is less effective as “Bliss” progresses, but she’s very convincing as this bewitching woman who entrances Greg.

And while she doesn’t get all that much screen time,

Cooper (“Reality High”) is impactful nonetheless as Emily embarks on a methodical-but-desperate search for her father.

On the other side of the camera, Cahill’s work is a mixed bag. The writer and director of 2011’s “Another Earth” and 2014’s “I Origins” obviously has some interesting ideas, but here he fails to tie them together as tightly as you’d hope.

That, however, isn’t to say the conclusion of “Bliss” is unsatisfying. It works, at least relatively well.

Plus, you can’t shake the feeling “Bliss” may have more to say, to reveal, to the viewer on a repeat viewing.

“This was an incredibly complex challenge to puzzle out and you see its execution, as with the photography, it is not meant to be overt but rather work on unconscious levels in the viewer’s mind,” Cahill says. “There’s a lot in ‘Bliss.’”

We can’t argue. For a movie that’s well under two hours and doesn’t appear to have had the largest of budgets, there is “a lot” in “Bliss.”

And that’s something.