An eco-thriller made by delicate and observant director Kelly Reichardt may have been a too unusual mix of genre and sensibility upon the film’s release. In retrospect, this haunting character study forgoes genre twists for simmering tension—emboldened by its astonishing cast led by Jesse Eisenberg.

Peter Sarsgaard often operates according to his own enigmatic frequencies, and here the character actor exactingly fine-tunes his persona as an eccentric intellectual. Playing an audiophile who has a near-mystic obsession with ambient sounds, he exudes weirdness in a magnetic performance.