Steven Soderbergh's latest film has less, and practically nothing, in common with his bloated "Ocean's" movies or a complex work like "Traffic" than it does with the spare regional stories of someone like David Gordon Green.

While it is no less meticulously orchestrated than those more commercial works, it's hard to separate whatever merits "Bubble" may possess from what it is meant to represent - which some want us to believe is the future of film.

"Bubble" is experimental mostly after the fact.

Although the long takes, glacial pace and impassive characters mark it as decidedly outside the mainstream, any lingering impact it may have will be on the unwieldy process of film marketing and distribution.

With technology already altering the way cinema is created - "Bubble" was shot on high-definition video - and consumed - DVD revenue outstrips ticket sales - "Bubble" proposes that the next step in the evolutionary ladder will be to release a film on multiple platforms on or about the same date.

"Bubble" will be in theaters today, on DVD Tuesday and is on the HDNet Films channel - owned by the film's millionaire executive producers, Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner - right now.

What long-term effect these alternative exposures will have on already dwindling theater attendance remains to be seen, but if the trend is successful, it will not be good.

"Bubble," however, is an unlikely tipping point. It was shot on location in Ohio and West Virginia with non-actors whose wooden characterizations match the living room paneling. Their lives are spectacularly uneventful. They work at a plastic doll factory where one character, a rangy string bean of a young man played by Dustin James Ashley, pours the rubber molds, and another, a large blank-faced, middle-aged woman played by Debbie Doebereiner, paints the doll's faces.

They are friends of a sort, and more in his mind than hers, though their interior lives are neither expressed nor explored.

She cares for her father; he lives with his unemployed mother. They drive to work together, and they stop for donuts on the way. Nothing much else happens or looms on the horizon.

Enter the unexpected: A new young female co-worker brought in to help work on a rush order.

She's a restless and cynical single mom who zeros in on the young man, turning the original friendship into a shaky triangle. The young woman, played by Misty Dawn Wilkins, is like a tornado in trailer park country, and the older woman is jealous and suspicious of her.

What happens next is a police procedural of sorts whose "Dragnet"-style earnestness is really the region's stoic personality applied to something outside its experience. The real mystery is not the crime but these lives.

Soderbergh frames each scene with the static realism of an Edward Hopper painting, and the result is a portrait of anesthetized lives silently screaming from inside a bubble.