This masterful vision of director Christian Volckman and a host of artist-technicians, is set in Paris in the year 2054. The Seine, the Eiffel Tower and other familiar landmarks are still discernible. But the City of Light has taken on an aura of hallucinatory dread, as skyscrapers loom in labyrinths of glass and steel. And a company called Avalon has become insinuatingly ubiquitous — its control machines are electronic billboards with models who mouth Big Brother- like messages about youth and beauty that come off as menacing rather than reassuring.

Enter tough cop Karas (voiced by Daniel Craig), a tough as nails type of character,  his mission is to find a young woman named Ilona (Romola Garai), an Avalon wunderkind who was kidnapped and may hold the key to a sinister breakthrough in genetic manipulation. The rest of the story makes about as much sense as "The Big Sleep," and is just as hard to follow. And like that noir classic, "Renaissance" features a beautiful, seductive sister, Bislane (Catherine McCormack).

But the plot is besides the point, Volckman and company are weaving isn't about words (the dialogue often seems purposefully clichéd or more likely lost in translation from French to English). It's about a fresh kind of optical language. In that, "Renaissance" succeeds brilliantly.

Of course, the film begs comparison with similar recent projects, especially Robert Rodriguez's "Sin City" and Richard Linklater's "Waking Life" and "A Scanner Darkly."