The commentary track on the DVD release of Angela works much like a crossword puzzle's answer key: It gives everything away, effectively ending the interesting part of the puzzle, but it's still nice to know it's available to provide closure. The 1995 debut feature of writer-director Rebecca Miller (Personal Velocity) is more enigmatic and open to interpretation than a crossword puzzle, however, and her decision to clearly lay out all the answers is a little surprising. Angela stars Miranda Stuart Rhyne as the title character, an intense, angular 10-year-old whose confident proclamations are entirely convincing to her wide-eyed 6-year-old sister (Charlotte Eve Blythe). In Rhyne's stories, Lucifer's rebellious angels were cast out of heaven and fell to earth, where they constantly look for sinful mortals to steal away. Rhyne seemingly creates this fable in order to scare Blythe after a church outing; she specifically claims that Lucifer is living in their basement and looking to claim a member of their fragile family. But after she overhears their mentally ill mother (a subtly effective Anna Thomson) admitting that she no longer has any feelings for her children, or any feelings at all, Rhyne begins to believe her own fables. Obsessed with sin and expiation, she leads Blythe in a series of increasingly complex rituals and symbolic journeys to "purify" them both and heal Thomson. Films that center on child actors risk becoming either opaque or cloying, but Rhyne and Blythe make compelling, naturalistic protagonists: Their simple sisterly chemistry is believable, and their matter-of-fact acceptance of signs, portents, and mysterious guiding angels makes it all surprisingly credible. Miller, too, manages an impressive balancing act, by shaping a complicated adult world around the sometimes-oblivious children, yet allowing the film to slip into Rhyne's morbid, febrile point of view often enough to give her fantasies weight. Rhyne's "signs" are sometimes boundary markers in an elaborate game of make-believe, and sometimes crucial (though heartbreakingly flimsy) protections against an oppressive and dangerous world. Miller's detailed commentary track neatly separates one pole from the other, but the film itself is far subtler, cleverly delineating a viewer-accessible path into Rhyne's troubled mind, while still revealing the dangers along that path that anyone else can clearly see. Anticipating both the emotionally shattering themes of Lars von Trier's Breaking The Waves and the breathless, haunted surreality of Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko, Angela skillfully delves into the nature of belief and reality, particularly the fervent, spontaneous beliefs and shifting realities of the young.