Lodge Kerrigan is one of America's most talented marginal directors, perhaps like Terence Davies in Britain.
He makes films rarely, but they are always minutely observed studies of madness and obsession. Not for everybody, of course, but if you want to see a superb performance, watch Damian Lewis in this.
He plays William Keane, a haunted man who wanders New York's Port Authority bus terminal looking for his young daughter, apparently abducted some months earlier.
Nobody is able to help and he returns to his cheap flop-house. There he meets Lynn (Amy Ryan), a single mother, and begins to bond with Kira (Abigail Breslin), her six-year-old daughter. The girl becomes a substitute for his own child in an unexpected way.
Keane allows us to share a harrowing feeling of loss not only through its unblinkingly bleak exterior but through the unforced playing of Lewis, whose damaged father may or may not be imagining the whole episode of abduction.
Steven Soderbergh produced and made his own cut of the film. But Kerrigan's is the more powerful and the one we now see. He has already given us an extraordinary portrait of paranoia in Clean, Shaven, his admired first feature. This film, too, is unlike anything else in the American cinema.
Keane
Cert: 15
