Virtually from its beginnings film, that ribbon of dreams, quite easily exploited its inherent proclivity for the impossible, displaying subjects and methods that previously presented enormous problems for traditional narrative. The cinema could traverse enormous distances, collapse time, violate the laws of the universe with impunity, and audiences that scorned other novel artistic practices happily accepted the daring experiments of motion pictures. We all take for granted the remarkable array of artifice that film employs to work its everyday magic.

The flashback and the flash-forward, among the oldest and simplest film devices, almost immediately solved otherwise tricky problems of chronological transition, memory, internal storytelling, and foreshadowing. The new movie Premonition in effect depends for all its action and meaning on those elementary devices, mingling numerous flashbacks and flash-forwards to preach a puzzling, contradictory, and ultimately unsatisfying little sermon on faith.

The movie begins with a flashback to which it keeps returning, a washed out image of a young couple, Jim and Linda Hanson (Julian McMahon and Sandra Bullock) viewing their first house for the first time; the bleached color scheme, like the sepia favored by many filmmakers, signals an event in the past. That past, as it happens, exists within Linda's memory, which haunts and deceives her throughout the film, causing her to doubt reality and for a while, experience something very like madness.

In the present, the movie shows Jim leaving on a business trip and Linda driving her two daughters to school, then going about her daily routine --- chatting with her best friend, dusting, washing clothes, and so on, rather tediously building toward some event the audience can see coming from a long way off. When the sheriff shows up at the front door and reports that Jim has been killed in an automobile accident, the picture begins the repetitive fusion of subject and style that propels its plot and develops its themes.

In the midst of her shock and grief, Linda finds herself reliving the day over and over again, following, with minor variations and gradual increments, the same pattern of action. The repetitions interrupt the present-day flow of events, most of them revolving around Jim's funeral. In some of those sequences, however, she awakens to find Jim alive and well, in others, she encounters unfamiliar people who claim to know her, in still others, she sees the puzzling consequence of some circumstance she somehow never witnessed.

The chronology of the repetitions varies, sometimes showing moments leading up to Jim's death, at other times jumping over the present to the near future. As the repetitions continue and the puzzles proliferate, Linda no longer knows if Jim really died, if she dreamed the whole matter, or finally, if it all constitutes the premonition of the title. Her confusion and her increasingly frantic behavior lead her mother to commit her to a mental institution, under the care of a physician whom she has never met but who informs her that she has previously consulted him.

Despite the variations and the central mystery, the picture's constant reiteration of its central device grows so dull and tiresome that its final solution seems considerably less than satisfying. The script only hints at the ancient question of whether foreknowledge determines the future itself, and though it explicitly invokes religion in several instances, it never dares to confront its vaguely Calvinist notions of predestination. Though it spreads a powerful sense of guilt all over its concluding sequences, it settles for a sentimental closure and a generally unearned statement of fulfillment and hope.

With its vague connections to such widely different movies as Groundhog Day and Déjà Vu, the picture demonstrates once again cinema's facility with rapid chronological transitions; the resemblances, however, hardly provide any assistance to the meaning or even the quality of Premonition. For all its maneuvering through the puzzles of its plot, it seldom attains anything like a coherent or even entertaining resolution of its central problems. It clearly functions more as a vehicle for Sandra Bullock, who appears and emotes in almost every scene, than as an additional example of those works that meaningfully experiment with the art of cinema and the mysteries of time.

Premonition (PG-13), directed by Mennan Yapo, is now playing at Culver Ridge 16, Pittsford Cinemas, Henrietta 18, Webster 12, Tinseltown, Greece Ridge 12, and Eastview 13.