The alpha and the omega often have been treated together, the one imparting meaning to the other, but, trying to have her cake and eat it, too, Australian writer-director Sarah Watt is fatally misguided in Look Both Ways, her feature début.

Wondering what was inside her fellow train passengers, then mentally conjuring up a horrific accident that would leave not a single survivor, the veteran maker of animal-titled animation shorts incongruously felt spurred to fashion a romantic comedy. Weird enough, but given that “most people’s lives include what we think of as tragedy,” she would end up doing “a bit of both, I guess.” Guessing means not being sure -- which this result shows.

Feel-good can somehow combine even with death, I guess. But when -- in addition to a catastrophic derailment at Arnow Hill, another man squashed by a slow train while chasing his dog, an agonizing cancer death and animated visions of cell metastasis and swimmers cut in two by sharks -- the opening has the male romantic comedy lead informed that he has testicular cancer already spread to the lungs and liver, where does one go from there?

Unenthusiastic about her love life and illustrator job, Meryl (Justine Clarke) is coming back from her father’s funeral when another in an apparently familiar line of her disaster premonition-visions comes true as, thinking to save his dog, a man dashes in front of a train on a curved section of track. Unhappily mixing with the 35mm of the story, such daydreams are rendered both within-story, in artist Meryl’s watercolors, and in processed hand-painted animation scenes in what is advertised as the director’s “signature ‘painterly’ style.”

Spookily but cheerily fatalistic, or perhaps as a shield, the heroine remarks on death as a part of “the natural order of things; there’s always someone worse off.” Not clear if she has actually seen the accident or only envisioned it, she is questioned by officers at the scene, while Southern Mail reporter Andy Walker (Anthony Hayes) and photographer Nick (William McInnes) are busy there, too. In particular, the latter’s shot of an unknown woman who is obviously related to the dead man and the living dog, becomes the stuff of front-page spread.

Fresh from the likely death-sentence cancer diagnosis -- “no point in speculating, the specialist will tell you more on Monday” -- Nick has informed only his kindly editor Phil Freeman (Andrew S. Gilbert) but soon falls into his own naturally morbid nightmares. He relives the recent cancer death of his stoic father Jim (Edwin Hodgman), agonizes over guilt at not having known how to be supportive, and, disbelieving his body, imagines animated cellular activity within himself.

Nick and Meryl run across one another again, discover they have each lost a father and, memento mori, “have been seeing death everywhere this week.” They fall into bed together, but his secret sickness prevents commitment. Andy, meanwhile, wrestles with life, not death, as health-center worker girlfriend Anna (Lisa Flanagan) announces she is pregnant. Intent on his career as well as on a storyline that many male road accidents are in reality suicides, and unable to connect meaningfully with his two children and ex-wife, the reporter is at a loss and stands misleadingly on the tracks.

Only smiling Phil seems able to be fulfilled, as he blows up balloons for family and friends to celebrate his daughter’s tenth birthday. Andy is a disaster as father and lover, Nick as son and lover, but with its look “more Woody Allen than Ingmar Bergman,” the film, and the lovers, will find a way, cancer and all. (Sadly, during post-production, Watt was diagnosed with cancer.)

Notwithstanding several awards back home plus two abroad and screenings at the joint Lincoln Center-Museum of Modern Art New Directors/New Films, Look Both Ways does not bring together its disparate elements. Bravely hopeful in the face of dreaded disease, yes; but romantic comedy? Strangely animated visions, okay; but of killer sharks, wrecks and proliferating invader cells? In both cases, the mix is deadly. 

(Released by Kino International and rated "PG-13" for violent images, sexual content and thematic material.)