The Shadow of Two Flies Upon a Pin, a low-budget interpretation of Nikolai Gogol’s short story “The Overcoat,” is an appealing marriage of old tales and new aesthetics. In part, this charm comes from the choice of story: “The Overcoat” is not a complex narrative but rather a tale of tropes and types, and thus doesn’t require extensive character development or human interaction. A fable wrapped in the cloak of a short story, the tale is well suited to the small budget, short form.

The narrative is told through a frame story, in which a young man with a new job tells his mother about his position’s previous occupant. He describes an older desk clerk who lives a Spartan life, with his only item of material pleasure being a worn, tattered overcoat. When he accidentally mars the overcoat, he is devastated to learn that it is beyond repair. He meets with his tailor to construct a new one and learns to live an even more meager existence in order to pay for the new coat. After getting a raise and receiving his new coat, the elderly man finally finds himself more popular among his colleagues, but his pleasures are fleeting. He dies that night, in a conflict in which his coat is stolen. The clerk disappears into death, as his associates soon forget about him. His spirit hasn’t forgotten about the coat, however, and returns to haunt the city looking for it.

In a world in which fast fashion has eradicated the tailor-made coat, Gogol’s story is too anachronistic for contemporary sensibilities. Smartly, director Raymond Zrike plays off the story’s temporal displacement; the milieu is sparse, with stark black and white photography and an almost empty milieu. A simple desk stands in for the office, a table for the old man’s living area, and a bed for his sleeping space. The emptiness successfully creates the film’s fabulist feeling, and the tight close-ups serve to augment the elderly clerk’s elation and despair. Even the tiny, contemporary touches (a digital camera, modernist apartment stairs) serve to underscore the story’s unreality and timelessness. The filmmaker’s youth is evident, however, in incorporating too many historical styles into the piece. The film loses its grace in shaking cameras, superimpositions, and chiaroscuro lighting, and there is entirely too much time spent on the frame story, which drags at the end. Despite these flaws, the Shadow of Two Flies upon a Pin is an ambitious project produced with (and on) very little, and demonstrates a wonderful filmic sensibility rarely seen, even in older and more mature filmmakers.