At the beginning of All of Us Strangers, it’s made clear with a few deft images that Adam (Andrew Scott) is leading a lonely life. Living in a nondescript high-rise apartment, Adam is in a sort of stasis. He is blocked on a screenwriting assignment and has little incentive to leave his bland habitat aside for the occasional errant fire alarm. Adapting a novel by Taichi Yamada, writer-director Andrew Haigh is careful and deliberate in revealing how Adam might have arrived at this state. In Haigh’s rendering, mood is more important than incident or plot points. The evident goal is to make the viewer feel Adam’s ache before they have cause or means to understand it.

The film progresses to draw Adam into relationships that gradually unlock the many gates he’s put up between himself and the world. Adam begins a romance with Harry (Paul Mescal), who introduces himself while swigging heartily from a bottle of liquor and prowling for late-night companionship. Adam also finds a way to explore the feelings he has for his parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell), who died in a car wreck when he was twelve years old. None of this comes easy to Adam, and Haigh is respectfully cautious as the narrative moves forward, as if he’s nervous about spooking his protagonist with too much too soon. There are times when All of Us Strangers is maybe a shade too reticent, but Haigh’s tender care is mostly effective. The film takes on an air of quiet loveliness.

Whenever Haigh’s approach threatens to make the film too wispy, Scott provides counteractive weight. The particulars of the story, which hinge on astonishing occurrences that present as mundane, require a performance of great complexity from Scott. He responds with deeply felt work of great subtlety. Where others presented with a similar challenge might opt for a lot of busy surface signaling of the character’s reactions, Scott goes deep. He doesn’t hold back, but he invites study of intricate tenor of his very bearing in a scene. It is resonant acting where it almost seems possible to register the person on screen thinking through their own presence in any given moment.

In the end, All of Us Strangers has a lot to convey about how human beings move through their lives. It is about regret and emotional risk, about family and love. It is about how easy it is to get lost in grief and the the treacherous paths that lead out of such darkness. Even hope, Haigh reminds, can have a rueful quality. Looking closely, a contradiction like that has some beauty. That any of us endure through it all, the film insists, is a form of triumph.