The stop-motion animation feature $9.99 is the second stateside release based on material by the young, talented Israeli fiction writer Etgar Keret, and it is, by a small margin, truer to the tone of the young novelist's stories than its predecessor, Wristcutters: A Love Story, a vision of lost love in a purgatory that looks like the industrial section of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Filled with quirkiness and fantastical dollops from the beyond, $9.99 is directed by Tatia Rosenthal, who filmed Keret's A Buck's Worth as a short. The premise of the short, a homeless man threatening to shoot himself if he doesn't get a dollar, constitutes part of the opening salvo of her full-length debut and indeed the film could have been easily re-edited into a collection of linear vignettes. Rosenthal threads them, however, through the throaty vagrant and his interactions with the tenants of a local apartment building. He is voiced by Geoffrey Rush and turns out to be an angel. The title refers to the amount of money spent by a young man named Dave on a book that teaches you the keys to life and happiness. His father Jim, voiced nicely by Anthony Lapaglia, doesn't know what to do with his younger scion and pawns him off on his elder son Lenny, a repo man. Lenny has begun an affair with the exotic Tatiana, who has a thing for hairless, smooth bodies. Elsewhere, split from his girlfriend, grunge reject Ron begins to get wasted and listen to tunes with a group of inch-tall college bros while a young boy begins to obsess over the piggy bank his father gave him. Things get even weirder: Two tenants begin to swim like dolphins, the Angel befriends a lonely elder, and let's just say those two plops of fleshy Cool Whip in Tatiana's apartment aren't beanbags. But anyone who is familiar with Keret's writing will know that these dips into the impossible and the perverse are his breadcrumb trail into the disappointment and disillusionments of the everyday; no matter how gleefully wonderful Rosenthal's film may be, this is adult-minded stuff with a strong aftertaste. Wristcutters smoothed over many of Keret's more politically ambitious nuances but it stuck with the consistent dread in Keret's novel. $9.99 similarly wields a tone of bland existence with small bursts of hope but does so in a multifaceted environment able to shift into fantasy with far more ease; it is entirely possible that animation is the only arena where Keret could be done justice. There are minor moments where the narrative lulls (the actual repossession sequence drags) but, as in his short stories, these moments build on Keret's particular bleakness, making the moments when the uncanny appears all the more powerful. The Israeli-born Rosenthal has crafted an oddly eloquent debut here, what Rush refers to as "a claymation of Robert Altman's Short Cuts." Co-written by the director and Keret, $9.99 uses fantasy as a portal into the dystrophic, unexplainable self, intimating that if you want to escape the strange, ubiquitous austerity of life, you might as well grow wings. Literally.