Robin Bartlett in H.

In the small town of Troy, New York, two eccentric couples, one old, one young, descend into increasingly odd behavior after a small meteor hits Earth. H. ploddingly chronicles the increasingly baffling effects of this alien object in the sleepy upstate town.

First we meet the older couple, Helen (Robin Bartlett) and Roy (Julian Gamble). Helen creates a doll to love and nurture as a real baby, perhaps because she is too old to have one and she never got around to have one with her husband. She brings her meticulously made-up, but still obviously fake, baby everywhere with her, drawing deservedly puzzled looks from strangers, and she rises daily at 5 am sharp to “nurse” the baby doll. Helen seems to understand why she spends so much effort pretending this object is a human infant, but the audience is barely given hints on why. Like much of the images and ideas in the film, her maternal caretaking is presented as self-evidently interesting in its strangeness.

Helen (Rebecca Dayan) and Alex (Will Janowitz), the younger pair, are archetypal hipster artists, specializing in baffling performance pieces and confrontational imagery. Helen, a Rashida Jones lookalike, is pregnant and inadvertently lactates through her blouse while giving an artist talk at a local college. Her main characteristic is looking blankly at the camera during her innumerable close-ups.

Alex, fond of pontificating about the symbiosis of creativity and destruction in art, could not look more the part of the quintessential hipster, with his lean, oblong face, bulging and blank eyes, and patchy beard. His ilk, hell-bent on creating self-important performance art despite the utter lack of interest in, or use for, such work, almost constitutes an argument against a liberal arts education.

Some sort of alien invasion may be transpiring as a result of the meteor strike, but the characters are already peculiar enough to be fairly alien themselves. Helen and Alex are distant, remote, mumbly, and muted. When weird things happen to weird people, it feels almost expected, rather than unsettling. It’s like an alien invasion is tailor made for their lives. Glass breaks, water appears in puddles on floors, and strange ear-piercing noises incapacitate. Peoples’ eyes become bloodshot when something is afoot. It’s as if Signs has been remixed by emotionally vacant hipsters.

Probably the best thing about H. is its music. The understated but persistently eerie piano and string-driven score helps create an atmosphere of dread. Unfortunately, the actual events of the film do not match the disquieting nature of the score, making this an object lesson in style over substance.