In the Bedroom

By PETER CALDER

(Herald rating: * * * * * )

A debut feature of astonishing maturity, this unflinching and perfectly observed study of a family rent by unexpected tragedy shows the extraordinary, even explosive, effect that may be achieved by restraint.

Director Todd Field, who co-wrote the screenplay from a short story by Andre Dubus, is best known to moviegoers as the pianist who helped Tom Cruise to enter the mysterious masked orgy in Eyes Wide Shut, but he takes to the job behind the camera like a veteran, extracting performances of unadorned subtlety which sound not a single false note.

Spacek and Wilkinson (an Englishman who played the dour, elder stripper in The Full Monty) earned a special jury prize at Sundance for their portrayal of Ruth and Matt Fowler, a contented couple in a New England seaport town.

He's a doctor, she's a music teacher and the only cloud on the horizon of their middle-class lives is the decision of their son (Stahl) to suspend his architecture studies in favour of working as a crayfisherman while he throws himself into a romance with an older woman, Natalie (the excellent Tomei).

The parents disagree over the wisdom of this. Matt is more indulgent, while the colder, more judgmental Ruth thinks the affair is a mistake because the woman has two kids. But it gets worse: her estranged husband (the bleach-blond Mapother exudes a reptilian menace) is still around and he is, to say the least, the jealous type. When he turns up at a family picnic, it becomes plain he's not going to let things lie.

To detail the crisis which envelops these lives would spoil much of the film's achievement. It's spare, even elliptical, in its exposition of the complex family dynamics and when the first dramatic act drags the story off its well-oiled rails, Field doesn't even show what happens.

Then, as he watches the Fowlers deal with the aftermath, Field maintains this sense of eeriecalm. Spacek and Wilkinson get the space to create wrenchingly good work in which the smallest facial expression is worth a page of dialogue and the arid hollowness of their grief is almost palpable.

"I want to stop acting like nothing happened," he cries at her at one point as their relationship corrodes, and it's a testament to the film's power that when he acts as he and we could never have imagined, it seems utterly congruent and authentic.

This is a film which is not afraid to lay bare its characters' shortcomings but crucially is not willing to judge them. Better, it's a film which understands that when humans are pushed to the edge, nothing makes more noise than silence.

Cast: Sissy Spacek, Tom Wilkinson, Marisa Tomei, Nick Stahl, William Mapother

Director: Todd Field

Rating: M, contains violence

Running time: 122 mins

Screening: Lido, Queen St