Indie sci-fi ‘Advantageous’ is irresistibly creepy

Gwen is still beautiful, but she’s getting older, and that means her time as spokeswoman for the Center for Advanced Health and Living is running out — something about “shifting desirability targets.”

Trouble is, her daughter, whom she is training to be a superkid (piano lessons, foreign language training, etc.), has been accepted into an elite high school that costs a lot of money.

There’s the kind of science fiction that’s action and mayhem — lasers, spaceships, aliens — and the kind of thought-provoking, near-future sci-fi that holds a mirror up to our times.

The Bay Area filmmaker’s Sundance Prize-winning film achieves much on a relatively meager budget (it has an impressive futuristic visual design), and the last half hour is so irresistibly creepy that it’s sure to invoke discussion after the screening.

(They collaborated on the 2012 short film “Advantageous,” from which the feature springs.) It is produced by and stars, in a small and refreshingly dramatic role, “The Hangover” comedian Ken Jeong.

Phang, whose last feature was the 2008 Sundance selection “Half-Life” (also a science fiction film), moves slowly but confidently, in her best moments achieving a sort of Kubrickian irony in scenes such as Gwen’s outrageous lunches with her friends and an increasingly weird phone conversation with a representative of the job search company she hired that causes her to stop and say, “Are you an actual human being?”