To be perfectly honest: as soon as I saw that Butterfly Kisses was a found footage film, I immediately held my judgments. If you’ve read my past reviews, you’ll know my feelings on FFFs and my frustration that they’re still being made. But I powered through nonetheless. And believe it or not, I’m glad I did.

Butterfly Kisses is a film within a film, essentially the Inception of FFFs and at times a little too meta and mind-fucking for its own good. Subplots weave in and out of each other and it becomes difficult to establish fantasy from reality in a film that is entirely fictional. But what begins as a story of piecing together footage of a faux 2004 student-directed documentary eventually turns into something larger and more meaningful: a struggling filmmaker risking nearly everything to create something great, and realizing his career comes at an even greater cost.

The film follows Gavin York, a starving artist with a wife and child who quite literally discovers found footage of an attempted student thesis film, a disturbing documentary that tries to prove the existence of a local horror myth known as “Peeping Tom,” a shadowy, Babadook-looking fellow who can only be seen if you stare down a specific tunnel for one hour without blinking. As he pieces together the footage, he does everything possible to prove its authenticity and release it as his own work but loses himself and the film crew who follows him into his project. We never really know for sure if Peeping Tom is real, or whether or not York goes insane in his journey to create something fulfilling. And despite some flaws, this idea is what makes Butterfly Kisses a “filmmakers’ film.”

Obviously, at this point in horror history, it’s essential to go into a found footage movie knowing that it is entirely false. Writer/director Erik Kristopher Myers knows this and acts accordingly. Butterfly Kisses is so self-aware that it almost becomes a critique of the genre itself. The Blair Witch-esque student documentary is nothing original, but it’s the encompassing faux-documentary that is. And indeed, the film has several other nods to Blair Witch, from an interview cameo by Eduardo Sanchez to creating an IMDB page for the fictitious Gavin York.

Blessed be, there is little to no shaky cam footage to make us lose our lunch. However, there is a vast amount of visual and sound glitches in the “found footage” that becomes a bit too distracting and takes away from the realism that was already there. The acting performances alone help Butterfly Kisses excel at making itself, and especially the black-and-white film-within-a-film, realistic and pretty damn creepy. And its self-aware quality makes sure that, except for only a few instances, we rarely question why the camera would still be rolling at certain moments.

Ultimately, it’s important to accept the film for what it is and to understand the greater message here. Obviously, the film itself is fictional. But the cost of a filmmaker’s “vision” is all too real.