Ben Rivers is an essayist and experimentalist in the cinema whose weird and wonderful 2011 film Two Years at Sea gained an enthusiastic following. Now he has returned with a new work, in collaboration with the American film-maker Ben Russell. This is another utterly uncommercial film, not far from video art. It is a creative exploration of stasis, and a cine-sonata of silence and solitude. Rivers is an artist to compare with the writer Sara Maitland in this respect.

A musician, Robert AA Lowe, is seen hanging out with some garrulous hippy-ish folk at what appears to be commune somewhere in northern Europe (the final credits reveal it is Estonia): everyone gets cheerfully naked in a sauna and a delicate, thoughtful young woman explains the effects of trance music. Then we see this same man utterly alone on an island, and pensively rowing a small boat in the surrounding waters. Finally, in the third section, Lowe appears as part of a death-metal band, playing onstage.

This final screamingly loud iteration of his existence is a sort of ironic commentary on the calm which has gone before, but Rivers and Russell also manage to find something almost quiet and placid in the music itself. I found this slightly less distinctive than Two Years at Sea, but it is arresting in many ways and concerned to elucidate the experience of being on one’s own. Is any other state possible?