“There’s a man named Andrew Wagner who lives in the same condo where I’m staying at Sundance. Three times I have encountered him there, and heard him pitch his movie, “The Talent Given Us.” The pitch is: The movie is a fiction film in which his parents, sisters and friends play his parents, sisters and friends. It’s not really a documentary about his family, but on the other hand it is inescapably about their personalities and his feelings about them.

I [eventually] went to see it, in one of those press screening rooms in the Yarrow Inn with the folding chairs on the risers. The screening began ominously with the Sundance host advising us, “If you want to exit, go out at the back of the theater and do not use the side door, which opens onto a locked courtyard.” As the lights went down and the movie began, I had fantasies of doomed critics, unwisely fleeing bad movies through the wrong door and freezing to death in the locked courtyard.

And then — well, then I saw a wonderful movie, one of the most original, daring, intriguing and seemingly honest films of the year. I say “seemingly” because I have no idea how much of the story is true. One thing is for sure: Wagner’s parents, sisters and friends are good sports.