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On paper, the story of an unassuming suburban upstate New York family rotting from the inside out doesn’t sound all that unique. But Wang infuses it with the malleability of a poem. Each scene features an element of spontaneity, as if any moment could lead these characters in an entirely new direction.

As with the director’s other works, there’s a self-conscious, constructed quality to “The Grief of Others,” but it rarely veers into the precious or the phony. It’s an artful portrait of a world that refuses the order we try to impose on it when we close ourselves off to heartache, doubt and pain.

A few years ago, Patrick Wang made one of the most promising indie debuts in a while with the audacious domestic drama In the Family. His follow-up, The Grief of Others, is a stirring and formally innovative adaptation of Leah Hager Cohen's novel... The story could come off as melodramatic, schematic, sentimental, but Wang is rather sober in his approach. It's a testament to both his fidelity to the novel and his faith in his actors that he gives shading and definition to all the characters.

Wang's chief interest – and strength – is in the little interpersonal moments, concentrated to a tee in static single shots. Though the emotional scale of the film is vast, it takes pride in the art of the miniature, even offering a synecdoche of itself in the form of an artist character's meticulous dioramas, "less Cornell than Finsler-esque," as another puts it. "I think they're heartbreaking," she adds, as she might have too about a film with this level of attunement to human feeling.

As in "In the Family," Wang's approach to filmmaking feels intuitive, even self-invented, down to a strange sound mix. His approach deserves a higher-profile showcase than ACID, the Cannes parallel festival that nobody talks about.

A delicate, elliptically structured portrait of six wounded souls coping with the aftermath of tragedy.