“Right now,” intones the narrator of Alexandre Koberidze’s Dry Leaf, “there are two people in the frame, but they can’t be seen.” We’re only twelve minutes in, but we already know that in this film there’s a great deal that can’t be seen. We are outdoors, in broad daylight—this much is clear. The bright rustle of green foliage in the top left corner of the frame tells us something. A single ray of light beams down from the leaves. The gray line toward the bottom of the frame could be a road. But what is the black-brown mass that occupies at least three-quarters of the shot? A wall? A house? A shed? A cluster of trees? Koberidze rests his gaze on this scene for over a minute, but things are no more legible at the end of the shot than they were at the beginning.

By the time we’re told about the two people in the frame who can’t be seen, we’ve watched a group of kids materialize out of the digital haze and taken in a pigeon—at least that’s what I thought it was—that turned out to be a cat. Visual puzzles crop up, as do their solutions, but the latter are only ever tentative, frequently shapeshifting into new sources of bewilderment. The reason for this onslaught of restless ambiguity is also Dry Leaf’s central gambit: Koberidze shot the film on his 2008 Sony Ericsson W95 cell phone. From the film’s first frame, we know how we’re seeing, even if we often don’t know what it is we’re looking at.

If two people in the frame can’t be seen, we’d assume it’s because the phone has failed to record them. Perhaps they’re wearing dark clothes, or they’re standing too far back to be registered by the camera. But as we learn in the next scene, we can’t see these people for another reason: They’re invisible. Koberidze, who serves as Dry Leaf’s director, cinematographer, editor, and screenwriter, cuts from the black-brown mass to a traffic circle, where the film’s protagonist, Irakli (Koberidze’s father David), is talking to a young man named Levani (Otar Nijaradze), a friend and colleague of Irakli’s daughter. Except Levani isn’t really there, not identifiably. We hear him speak, and we see Irakli shake hands with the patch of air where Levani’s hand would reasonably appear, but the only figures we see in the frame are Irakli and a sculpture of a soccer player lifting his foot to kick a ball. Levani’s invisibility is a question for us and only us to ponder. Neither Irakli nor anyone the two men encounter over the course of the film seems to feel that anything is amiss.

Irakli meets with Levani after he and his wife Nino (Irina Chelidze) receive a note from Lisa, their daughter. “I won’t be coming home today, or tomorrow,” she writes. “Not for quite some time.” Lisa has traveled widely, and she has promised to return (“Time will pass, and we’ll see each other again”), and anyway, she’s 28—but Irakli and Nino are still worried about their daughter. Where could she have gone? And what compelled her to leave? Before she disappeared, Lisa and Levani were working on a photo essay about soccer fields in rural Georgia—she was the photographer and he was the writer. If Levani can recall which soccer fields Lisa photographed, maybe the villagers they meet will remember her and tell Irakli where she went next. The day after they meet by the sculpture, Irakli and Levani’s voice set out, in a Subaru Forester, on a search to find Lisa.

Missing relatives, invisible people: Structurally, Dry Leaf takes the form of a metaphysical mystery—a quest narrative that keeps the pursuit front of mind even as it zeroes in on silences. Everywhere Irakli and Levani end up, they ask to be directed to the fields and wonder if anyone has seen Lisa. Over and over again, Irakli is told by adults and children, by visible interlocutors and by invisible ones, that they’d remember if they’d seen her—a more emphatic denial than a simple no, or a maybe. In any case, questions and answers constitute a small fraction of this film’s three-hour-and-six-minute runtime. At the slightest opportunity, Koberidze’s phone camera meanders off and finds a cow or a patch of grass to attend to.

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Dry Leaf is concerned above all with the materiality of the camera—what it captures as it meanders off, and what it fails to detect. To paraphrase the title of Koberidze’s previous feature, what do we see when we look at (or through) the Sony Ericsson?

We see graininess, fuzziness, pixelation. We see shapes over details, colors over textures. In the absence of immediately legible images, details and textures don’t disappear, however—as Dry Leaf’s unclarity clarifies, they proliferate. A car driving down a road becomes a source of visual drama not because we wonder if it’ll have trouble traveling from one side of the frame to the other, but because its wheels may suddenly start to resemble spinning plates. A shot of a pond doesn’t need a swimmer or a fish to generate excitement—what’s thrilling is the moment when the image congeals and the pond acquires a thick, black border, a failure to process contrast that nevertheless reads as a real-life Cezanne landscape taking shape before our eyes. A white curtain in the breeze twitches when it should be billowing, and a newspaper being blown around a soccer stadium looks somehow heavier than it really is, flopping around the stands with an odd decisiveness. Examining Koberidze’s footage of a waterfall, we wonder where the water ends and the phone’s distortions begin. Is the jitteriness of the leaves clinging to the rocks a trick of the camera, or a trick of nature? Why does the graininess waver so much in a single shot?

Or take the cow moseying across a field (I assume it’s a cow, more due to the cowbell than the animal’s somewhat cowlike features) and the strange shape following behind, less an object than an orange glow that calls to mind a firefly, or maybe a lava lamp. Light is fading, the fog is thickening, and the camera pans to the right, guided by the cow and the orange object but not quite in thrall to their movements, either. The fog recedes and the suggestion of a valley and a mountain range take shape. We keep panning and land on another cow, this one undeniably cowlike, and at this point Koberidze zooms in, a willfully clunky, unsubtle zoom that seems to stop time and fixes the animal as an object of quasi-scientific inquiry. Over the course of this minute and a half, the image reconstitutes itself again and again—more pixelated here, clearer there, a tree that looks like a mountain, a cloud that looks like a bird.

There isn’t a single frame in Dry Leaf that fails to provide surprise and pleasure. Nothing is boring; everything is interesting. And everything sounds interesting, thanks to Dry Leaf’s perpetually inventive electronic score, by Koberidze’s brother Giorgi. Working with their father as a three-person crew, Alexandre shot hours of footage, and Giorgi recorded sounds and composed the music as the three men drove and wandered around the Georgian countryside. The distinction between score and diegetic sound is often so small as to be nonexistent, like the distinction between a shape and a blur. Leaves rustle, cowbells clank, bells chime, and the music transforms itself in real time with impressive fleetness.

Koberidze’s first feature, Let the Summer Never Come Again, was also shot on his Sony Ericsson, but where that film foregrounds the symphony of city life, Dry Leaf fixates on nature. Before he sets off on his voyage, Irakli asks his student Anna to feed Panda, a stray dog that lives in a park across town. Thoughtful and serious, Panda stands in for this film’s many creatures great and small—dogs, cats, cows, pigs, horses. For my part, I knew that I had fallen in love with Dry Leaf when another cow—or was it a horse?—ambled through the frame enfolded in a pixelated outline distinct from the rest of the sky behind it. I understood that what I was looking at was the byproduct of a ringing artifact, a ghost at the meeting point of cow and sky. But the technical explanation for the effect—the Sony Ericsson’s problems with compression—did little to diminish my certainty that Koberidze had managed to capture on film an animal’s energy, its haloed forcefield, as if all that lossiness were actually a form of foundness, a means to surface our innermost essences.

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If you can, see Dry Leaf at a theater. That Koberidze shot the film on a phone is not a pretext to watch it on one. Only on a big screen can you appropriately experience its revelations, like the film’s slippery centerpiece, a two-minute-long sequence at a car wash, filmed from inside the Forester. As Irakli sprays the car with foam and water, a red and white traffic barrier outside the passenger’s side window seems to melt. Koberidze cuts to a brief shot of the driver’s side window, and then to a longer shot of the windshield. Gray and white whorls of soap slowly give way to misshapen patches of soaplessness, through which we can glimpse the grass and foliage outside. Back to the driver’s side window, where the soap is pushed away by the intense spray of water, gradually exposing a beige wall whose planks and nails seem to dance until the water finally slides down the glass. The scene continues for thirty or so radiant seconds as a red car emerges in the side-view mirror and a tree seems to grow in real time through the scrim of dripping water.

Edited with humbling precision, with Giorgi’s score impossibly in sync with the balletic movement of soap, suds, and water, this sequence epitomizes Dry Leaf’s persistent fusion of the representational and the abstract. Only in the scene’s first second or so do we find ourselves totally confused by what’s onscreen—after that, we never really wonder what we’re seeing, but it doesn’t matter, as the impulse to situate ourselves gives way to the sublime experience of watching the phone struggle with chromatic aberration at the same time as it endows water and glass with the complexity they already possess (but which they’re rarely granted). The notion of clarity seems immaterial. What do we see when we look at the Sony Ericsson? Everything.

Koberidze’s attunement to his phone’s capacities is cheerfully self-conscious. In a somewhat more brashly mic-drop moment half an hour earlier, Koberidze zooms into a red hedge behind a soccer goal and then keeps on zooming. An already blurry image gets blurrier and blurrier, culminating in a fidgety redness that reminded me of a beating heart, or—if that’s too precious—the inside of a body. After about forty-five seconds, Koberidze starts to zoom out and the image desaturates, swapping blood-red for a cool, grayish white that is eventually revealed to be a pond surrounded by a little grove. We don’t see an edit, but then again we don’t see much—just blobs and pixels. An in-camera trick? Postproduction manipulation? Whatever it is we’re actually seeing, the result is more psychedelic than in the earlier zoom, with the cow. All we know for sure that we’ve started in one place and emerged in another.

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In its journey through the countryside to help redress a loss, and its commitment to locating the granular in the mystical and vice versa, Dry Leaf obviously recalls the work of Abbas Kiarostami, particularly his sun-drenched late-’90s road movies Taste of Cherry and The Wind Will Carry Us. Like Kiarostami, Koberidze is fond of modest miracles. Over the course of the film, Irakli and Levani’s search comes to seem quixotic, or at least stubbornly enigmatic—do they really expect to find Lisa? How could they, after they’re told time and again that no one has seen her? It’s thus especially satisfying that their long series of encounters and the longer spaces in between culminate in a lovely moment of resolution that asks us to rethink everything we’ve seen. As the film winds down, it becomes obvious that for all the visual experimentation at work, we have been watching a film that’s unafraid of a good story.

A good story, and a good joke. Is there anything more geriatric millennial than using a cheap, glitchy, highly imperfect technology from one’s youth in a way no sane person would ever use it? The Xennial sensibility will forever fixate on the moment when the internet was tactile, when consumer electronics weren’t slick or seamless, when a digital file’s imperfections and graininess endowed it with character. Koberidze’s Sony Ericsson is so ridiculous, but his touch is so light that his beautiful joke never wears thin.

Fetishism, anachronism, nostalgia: these are some of the risks whenever a director sets out to use technology that’s old or out of date, and the connection Koberidze draws between ghostly images and ghostly landscapes accordingly feels inevitable. Every time Dry Leaf gave us a soccer goal that Lisa might have photographed for the newspaper, its netless frame usually surrounded by overgrown grass and often rusted over, I couldn’t help but make the natural leap between the rectangle of the goal and the rectangle of the movie screen. At one point, Irakli visits an abandoned cultural center that was home to a movie theater before the building’s second floor collapsed in an earthquake. The club’s proprietor even points out the part of the room where the projector was located. The screenings, he says, used to be packed.

Still, despite its seriousness about loss, Dry Leaf offsets its occasional elegiac impulses with a profound sense of hope—for the future and for the medium. Koberidze isn’t a polemical filmmaker, but like Radu Jude in his recent work, he confronts the contemporary tyranny of clarity head-on. The answer to low standards, second screens, and the flatness of high resolution, Koberdize suggests, is work that joyfully examines the limits and possibilities of cinema. In Dry Leaf, slyness wins out.

As Irakli and Levani (and Lisa) learn, soccer fields are everywhere in Georgia—everyone in the film can easily point to the nearest one. Movie theaters used to be everywhere, and they could be, again. “I was not looking for abandoned places,” Koberidze told Screen Slate’s Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer recently. “If you go to many of the places that we filmed at in the evening, when the sun is gone and it’s not so hot anymore, you will find some people playing football.” And who’s to say that’s not actually happening onscreen? “We’ll never know because in the film we have many invisible characters, so any time you see an empty field it might actually be full.”

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