An edgy, awkward drama from Ray Lawrence, the Australian director who gave us the edgy, awkward drama Lantana six years ago. That began with a dead woman and was reminiscent of US writer Raymond Carver and director Robert Altman. This time he's gone straight to the source for the theme (one of the many Carver short stories that made up Altman's Short Cuts) and the film has hardly started before we have another dead woman on our hands.

There's no mystery this time about either the murderer or the discovery of the body: it's found by a fishing party led by Gabriel Byrne and his team, off on an annual outback break and unable to communicate with home. They decide to tether the body to a tree and carry on fishing: that's the fulcrum of the plot and the event that leads to a splintering of the guys' relationships and among the community at large - the fishers are white and the body is of a young aboriginal woman and as those who know Australian history or saw Philip Noyce's Rabbit-Proof Fence will know, there's a lot of guilt, bad blood and resentment in thatbackstory.

Jindabyne is a New South Wales town whose name means valley in Aboriginal. (The original valley was flooded in 1967, which may have produced some resentments of its own.) Lawrence's film has characters full of disquiet and misunderstanding, most of all the lead couple, the versatile and underrated Gabriel Byrne and Laura Linney, whose whole career seems to have been a tiptoeing ballet of prickly pain. I can't recall a happily married Linney and it's a toss-up which is the most uncomfortable pairing out of this, The Truman Show or The Squid and the Whale. Jindabyne is full of bile beneath its mostly nondescript discussions and its setting, backgrounded by Australia's endless horizons, feels cut-off and claustrophobic at the same time. Lawrence doesn't make many films, but you know he's not going to give you an easy ride or any fluffy feelgoodery.