There is nothing obviously wrong with Audrey (Moon Choi). The 36-year-old has a physical therapist job she cares about, with coworkers she mostly likes. Her Brooklyn apartment looks small and a bit shabby, but comfortable. She’s single, but seems to enjoy an active, lightly kinky sex life on the apps.

It’s just that she seems adrift, somehow — as if she’s not only lost her way but forgotten where she was trying to go in the first place, if indeed she ever knew.

Bedford Park, Stephanie Ahn’s poignant directorial debut, follows Audrey on her path toward something like self-actualization, sparked by a chance encounter with a similarly lonely soul. Though its unflashy style and delicate emotionality are unlikely to sweep viewers off their feet, its eye for fine detail and bittersweet tone make it an absorbing experience worth seeking out.

This transformative relationship enters Audrey’s life through the unlikeliest of avenues. Eli (Son Sukku), a rough-around-the-edges ex-wrestler, is the other party in a car accident that leaves Audrey’s mom (Won Mi-kyung) with an injured wrist. The incident forces Audrey back into her childhood home in suburban New Jersey to help take care of her, and into Eli’s orbit to help square away the insurance information and repair bills.

Audrey and Eli’s first meeting is a contentious one, with accusations and rude words and eventually pieces of fruit getting thrown around in all directions. (Between this and Netflix’s Beef, there’s apparently no better outlet for Korean American Millennial angst than car-based tantrums.) But a second encounter takes a turn when Audrey finds herself in a vulnerable position, and Eli, a decent guy underneath his prickly exterior, steps up to help. The mutual thawing turns into a mutually beneficial carpool arrangement, which warms into friendship and eventually more.

The script, also by Ahn, leans slightly too much on contrivances to nudge the relationship along. And while Eli’s solitude is explained by his circumstances (he’s laying low from a shady situation engineered by a toxic relative), it’s harder to tell whether we’re meant to understand Audrey as having no other friends whatsoever, or if it’s just more convenient for the screenplay that whatever pals she does have forget to text her the entire time she’s in New Jersey.

But it helps make up for these minor missteps that Ahn has such a firm grasp on who her characters are and where they’re coming from. Combined with her eye for small but telling details — an introductory scene of Eli eating peanut butter directly out of the jar with his fingers speaks volumes about where this man is in his own life, before he even speaks a word — it ensures that even when certain plot beats feel a bit engineered or random, the emotions rippling out from them are wholly believable.

As the central not-quite-couple, Son and Choi are intriguingly unpredictable together at first, like a pair of stray cats sizing each other up, ready to pounce or run as needed. When they finally begin to let their guards down, one awkward car-ride convo or hesitant food court meal at a time, the connection is more profound and more tender for being so hard-won.

What brings Audrey and Eli together, other than a slow-burn attraction, is a sense of stuckness — of being trapped between the heavy expectations of their families and the dissatisfaction they harbor about lives that haven’t quite turned out as they’d hoped (even if they themselves probably couldn’t articulate what exactly it was they did want).

Audrey, the single and childless and PhD-less product of a stable but unhappy home, has fallen short of the life planned out for her by her parents. In the present, her mother lies to her church friends about Audrey’s nonexistent medical career, pressures her to date a nice and rich but hopelessly boring divorcé and guilt-trips Audrey into extending her stay. Eli, whose childhood was fractured by tragedy, dodges a mother who seems more interested in asking him for money than offering him love, and hides out from an ex and young daughter whose life he apparently fears ruining.

No wonder they feel that in each other, they’ve finally found the one person around whom, as Audrey puts it, they can finally breathe — someone who comes to them with no preconceptions or expectations, who see them for the person they actually are and not the person they want them to be.

Woven through this entire messy tangle of relationships is the issue of their shared Korean American identity, in all its variously beautiful and burdensome complexities. It is a gift that Bedford Park grants its leads the space to navigate that complex terrain on their own terms, rather than falling back on stereotypes that position it solely in opposition to a “mainstream” (white) culture.

It empathizes with Audrey, who is unwilling to be the dutiful girl her mother wants her to be, but isn’t ready to entirely reject the role, either. It’s gentle about Eli, born in Korea but raised by a white mother, feeling self-conscious because he prefers forks to chopsticks and barely understands the language of his birth parents.

And it understands that the umbrella of that identity might cover even those who’d rather reject it — like Audrey’s mother, who moved to the U.S. in search of a better life for her children but now bemoans the fact that they’re too American; or her father (Kim Eung-soo), whose pride has never recovered from the loss of status he suffered when he traded his cushy office job in Korea for blue-collar grocery store work in the States.

Almost inevitably, Bedford Park makes its way to the Korean concept of han, defined here by Audrey as “an ancient heartache when a person carries their family’s trauma.” Is it “carried voluntarily, like a sense of duty,” she and Eli wonder over beers and bar food, or do they have no choice in the matter?

The film doesn’t have any firm answers to counter these questions, let alone any easy reassurances or even a tidy happy ending. But in its nuance, its curiosity and its deep affection for its characters, it offers anyone familiar with burdens like Eli and Audrey’s the same thing they give to each other — the chance to sit down and take a breath, with someone who really gets it.

While the happy and only barely tortured gay romance of Heated Rivalry sweeps the nation, nay the world, it might be instructive, if depressing, to remind ourselves that there are many young queer people who have a much harder time realizing their desires. The new film Leviticus, from director Adrian Chiarella, is a solemn and frightening acknowledgment of that reality, albeit one allegorized into supernatural horror. 

The film takes place in a dreary town in Victoria, Australia, a drab industrial backwater whose people — or, at least some of whom — flock to religion to give their lives the brightness of hope and higher purpose. Teenager Niam (Joe Bird) has just moved to town with his mum (a deceptively sinister Mia Wasikowska) but already yearns to escape it. He finds some deliverance, of the emotional kind anyway, in a classmate, Ryan (Stacy Clausen), a handsome ruffian with whom Niam shares a special bond. They have found love, or at least affectionate lust, in a hopeless place, just as many kids have done before them, since time immemorial.

Chief on the film’s mind is what happens when the relative innocence of that blush of first infatuation — neither boy seems particularly troubled by his proclivity — is spoiled by outside forces, like family and the church. As a hardcore religious right gains traction around the globe, Leviticus challenges the notion, made too easy to accept by the Heartstoppers and Love, Simons of the world, that coming out isn’t really such a big deal anymore. It is still — perhaps increasingly so, in this moment of backslide — monumental and dangerous for plenty of young people, often plunging their lives into horror.

Chiarella is particularly interested in the abuses of conversion therapy, which hideously imagines that something innate can be excised or, at least, wholly ignored. It is a form of torture, one whose effects can cause lingering and sometimes fatal harm. Such trauma is made manifest in Leviticus, in which these afflicted kids are stalked by a sinister force that, cruelly and perversely, takes the form of the person they most want in the world.

It’s a grim and clever conceit, even if its rules don’t always make total sense. What the device does most effectively is force the audience to think about the real-world analog of these characters’ psychic (and physical) pain: the many young people who have been told that their sexual and romantic desire will destroy them, that a fundamental human attraction is something they must flee from in mortal terror. How heartbreaking, and how vile, that any adult claiming compassion would seek to imbue a child with that extreme allergy to their own self. 

Leviticus has a enough gore and jumpy moments to qualify it as a proper horror film. But its true scariness is of the forlorn kind, as Naim and Ryan grow distrustful of each other, not sure if the needful, seductive person they see before them is real or a menacing specter who means to kill them. That doleful eeriness is the film’s best asset, adding a tragic queer love story to the template of youth-curse films like It Follows and Talk to Me. Both Bird and Clausen play this mounting nightmare with the appropriate ache and desperation, elevating the emotional tenor of Chiarella’s sad, frequently bleak film. Sure, Clausen is pretty enough that one wonders why he doesn’t just monetize his Instagram and flee to Sydney, but otherwise both he and Bird appropriately register as two small-towners trapped in a toxic community, starkly rendered in Chiarella’s drab austerity. 

Though his metaphors are awfully on the nose, Chiarella convincingly insists on their power. He has made his argumentative trick work quite well, even if the movie’s messaging sometimes crosses into the obvious or didactic. And anyway, maybe we are at a time, yet again, when such simple lessons bear repeating, when it is not lame or dated to highlight the terrible violations of the most basic kind of homophobia. 

There is also, perhaps, a slightly radical suggestion teased out toward the end of Chiarella’s film, one that harkens back to so many narratives of the past: Those stories told of uncles and sons and countless others who fled their oppression in search of something they knew to be true and decent, waiting for them in distant, glittering cities. Leviticus has the sturdy nerve and conviction to plainly state that sometimes home and family are irredeemable and worth abandoning. It is not so concerned with changing hearts and minds, but with saving lives. 

A mother-son road movie more laced with humor than laden with trauma, Hot Water marks a warm and sensitive, if not entirely satisfying, debut feature from Ramzi Bashour.

There’s an undeniable familiarity that nips at the heels (or wheels?) of the film as it traverses classic American landscapes alongside its protagonists, a tightly wound Lebanese woman (Lubna Azabal) and her turbulent, U.S.-raised teenager (Daniel Zolghadri). We’ve been here before — in this situation, with these types, against these backdrops. Every year at Sundance, to be exact.

Luckily, the leads are good company, and there’s just enough in Hot Water that feels fresh and personal to lift it above dreaded indie staleness. Bashour has a light touch, an aversion to exposition, histrionics and overt sentimentality, that serves the material well.

If the film’s modesty, its glancing quality, is a strength, it’s also a limitation. There’s a nagging sense that the writer-director is just skimming the surface of his characters, their relationship to each other and to the country they live in. The Syrian-American Bashour knows these people and their story in his bones — the movie has several autobiographical elements — but he doesn’t always translate that depth of understanding to the screen.

The problem is an excess of tact — a reluctance to really dive into the ideas simmering here, to allow the central pair’s experience of forced proximity on the open American road to palpably complicate or illuminate their respective identities and points of view. As pleasant, and occasionally poignant, as Hot Water is, it never commits fully to either its comedy or the emotions that often feel assumed rather than earned. And Bashour is not yet a sophisticated enough filmmaker to conjure richness of meaning with the narrative and visual economy of a Debra Granik, a Kelly Reichardt or an Eliza Hittman, to name (perhaps unfairly) some American neo-realist touchstones to emerge from Sundance.

Hot Water is Bashour’s third collaboration with writer-director Max Walker-Silverman: The latter is a producer here, while Bashour composed the music for Walker-Silverman’s quiet soul-stirrer A Love Song and edited his more ambitious but less affecting follow-up, Rebuilding. Theirs is a softer, fuzzier regional cinema than the aforementioned auteurs’ work, infused with a wistful belief in the redemptive promise of American community, as well as a reverence for the natural beauty we take for granted.

In A Love Song and Rebuilding, the protagonists are rooted to the land in a way that Hot Water’s Layal (Azabal), a foreign-born professor of Arabic at an Indiana college, is not. Layal’s ambivalence toward her adopted home is a note of discordancy that the film never taps for its full dramatic potential — an example of how Bashour’s gentle approach veers toward a sort of frictionless amiability. The movie is full of fleeting interpersonal clashes, but deeper social and political undercurrents are left largely unexamined.

The catalyst in Hot Water comes when Layal’s son Daniel (Zolghadri) attacks another student with a hockey stick, getting himself expelled from the high school that’s already held him back twice. Out of options and patience, Layal decides to drive Daniel out to Santa Cruz to live with his father and finish out his senior year. Cue the procession of sunbaked cornfields, plains dotted with wind turbines, snow-capped mountains, craggy red rock, and the neon pageantry of the Vegas Strip. The expected stops at motels, diners and gas stations are punctuated by Layal’s fraught phone calls back to Beirut, where her sister reports on their mother’s declining health.

Hot Water ambles along agreeably, buoyed by the believably fluid dynamic between Layal and Daniel. The filmmaker and his performers don’t overplay the fractiousness; there’s tension in their relationship, but also teasing affection, respect and a push-pull of aggravation and amusement that is the near-universal dance of parents and teenagers. Daniel gets a kick out of winding his mom up and watching her go off; she chastises him for bad choices and ribs him for not speaking better Arabic. Bashour and DP Alfonso Herrera Salcedo favor straightforward two-shots to showcase that interplay, rather than close-ups capturing instances of individual reflection or realization.

“Why are you so tense and bummed all the time?” Daniel asks Layal, a question that hints at the gulf that separates this middle-class American kid and his immigrant single mom. He has enjoyed the privilege of nonchalance, of messing up, while she has endured the stress of providing a good life for her son while navigating cultural bewilderments like “chicken-fried steak” and students demanding do-overs on botched oral presentations.

I could have happily watched a whole film about Layal’s on-campus life teaching Arabic to mostly white students. A priceless, too-brief scene of her coaching a smiling, square-jawed bro through some challenging pronunciation indeed suggests Bashour doesn’t necessarily recognize what his most distinctive material is. Ditto a glimpse of Daniel, shirtless, rehearsing pick-up lines in the mirror — a seemingly throwaway moment that’s slyer and more intimate than much of the rest of the movie.

Tossing Layal and Daniel into a car and onto the road is perhaps the least interesting, and certainly easiest, way into this story, allowing the filmmaker to push them into confrontation with each other, and with America, rather than coaxing out conflict organically. To his credit, and in keeping with the spirit of the film, Bashour exercises restraint. Layal and Daniel do more bickering than blowing up, and Hot Water doesn’t over-indulge in fish-out-of-water shtick or ambush them with rednecks and racists.

Rather, their journey is textured with odd little encounters, some more compelling than others. Dale Dickey shows up as a benevolent, aphorism-dispensing hippie in an interlude that plays like filler. I preferred the unusually composed kid working the front desk of a motel (“I don’t know, I don’t eat meat,” he notes after referring a hungry Layal and Daniel to a nearby Jack in the Box). Or the run-in with a ripe-smelling hitchhiker, which at first appears to reveal a generational divide between mother and son before uniting them in revulsion.

Azabal (Incendies, The Blue Caftan), alternating among English, Arabic and French with regal impatience, is the kind of performer who can convey fierce love and pride with a mere glance, through sunglasses no less. Layal is perpetually harried — her exasperated “Oh, Daniel!” when he sneezes with a mouth full of carrot cake is perfection — but there’s also a sincere wonderment in the way she looks at her son. Zolghadri, so terrific in Owen Kline’s Funny Pages, flaunts the same gift for note-perfect line delivery here, pivoting seamlessly from sarcasm to authentic feeling and back again.

The leads are so strong that the movie’s reliance on cutesy shorthand — Layal’s constant hand sanitizing and her compulsive clementine-eating as a replacement for smoking, Daniel and Layal exiting their motel room in a slow-mo strut (have mercy, filmmakers: no more slow-mo struts) — registers as an unnecessary distraction. These actors don’t need things in boldface to build out their characters.

The final section, with its minor twist and succession of heart-to-hearts, seems calculated to surprise and stir, but underwhelms. It’s the offhanded bits of Hot Water that land most potently — the ones that hint at aches and yearnings beyond the immediate needs of the plot. “Did you say bye to the house?” Layal asks Daniel as they prepare to pull out of their driveway and hit the road. “The house has no ears, mom,” he mocks. Then, when she gets out of the car to grab something, he gazes up at the home he’s about to leave behind, and whispers: “Bye, house.” That kind of moment, tiny but casually heart-piercing, makes you impatient to see what Bashour does next.