People are places exert powerful holds. They can be nurturing in their influence, or they can keep someone’s ambitions — their very possibilities — smothered, doing so with a blind indifference to the effect being rendered. Quite often, the opposite results coexist in the same moment, creating an ambivalence that leaves wounds, or at least hard, lingering aches. This is a major component of the complicated truth that gives a thrumming vein of life to Columbus, the feature film debut of skilled video essayist Kogonada.

In a performance of wounding honesty, Haley Lu Richardson plays Casey, a young woman living a quiet existence in her hometown of Columbus, Ohio, working at the library and clasping her loving knowledge of the modernist architecture that made the Midwestern city a destination for an especially rarified tourist. She strikes up a friendship with Jin (John Cho), visiting unwillingly after his scholar father has taken ill. In tender fashion, the two bond intellectually. In Kogonada’s screenplay, there are chatty exchanges, abundant with affection, but also challenge, mentorship, and mutually developed wisdom. Without thundering epiphanies, they together find their ways to just a little more grace, comfort, and self-assurance that they had before their orbits converged.

Kogonada films the proceedings with a moving appreciation for stillness that honors the imposing structures that are both anchor and inspiration. The edifices studied intently by Casey don’t move, yet they are dynamic in their combination of function and stealth beauty. Sometimes it is only by staying firmly in place that an entity prepares to soar. In Columbus, Kogonada’s measured, focused approach unlocks an emotional narrative that is brave and piercingly real.