Cannes’s 2006 Grand Jury Prize under its belt along with two British Independent Film Awards, Red Road boasts an “atmospheric and intense thriller” air and marks the feature début of director Andrea Arnold, who intentionally leaves minor points open to stimulate discussion.

Beyond the flawed but arresting film itself, the genesis of the project is interesting as experiment and perhaps a path for the future. Till now this is the sole realization of three planned works of an Advance Party Concept, which gives separate directors background and location freedom within a Scottish setting against which to develop the same quartet of characters (played by the same actors) plus any necessary supporting players. One screening attendee detected a von Trier-Jørgen Leth device in this, but Lucas Belvaux’s “The Trilogy” or cadavre exquis comes more to mind, the latter a Surrealist adaptation in which several artists contributed independently to a then assembled composition.

Within the “given restrictions,” Arnold wrote to “tap into the things that had resonance for me, felt like my own,” and, whatever elements of autobiography or not, behind a surface of mystery, revenge and late disclosure her story concerns loss and pain, love and acceptance, redemption and return.

In common with many an early work, while imparting a sense of trauma-reduced emotions the technique threatens to take over, as self-conscious lighting and fuzzed neon colors -- red dominates -- limited shifting depth of field, and angled close-ups soon tire eye and mind. Within the enclosed space of banks of monitor screens (lined images from overemphasized DIV outdoor surveillance cameras) and that of her own mental state, a uniformed Jackie Morrison (British television actress Kate Dickie’s first feature) wears a marriage band, sometimes smiles wanly, and checks on street activity to report to Division E on likely runaways and crime in a depressed area.

She has periodic quickie intercourse with a married acquaintance in the front seat of a van and with equal lack of joy attends a wedding where she refuses to dance, awkwardly averts her gaze from the bride’s unsteady father Alfred (Andrew Armour) and, pleading work, leaves early.

Among those she observes, a middle-aged man walking a dog and a plump young woman crop up a few times -- the former then consciously encountered in front of a shop, the latter behind blinds dancing to an iPod and, later, bleeding from the nose -- but prove red herrings, for her stoic attention is caught by one of two men in a locksmith’s vanette.

With a rapid glance at an Evening Times front page filed away in the row home where her garden grows to weed and she spends much of the time with bedcovers pulled over her head, she trails the taller of the two young men, on monitors and in person on foot. Via the former, she sees him park opposite a school and give or deliver a package of plastic cosmetic jars to an adolescent girl, while she physically follows him from a laundromat to a coffee shop, where he runs an appraising hand up the waitress’ leg.

Tracking the unshaved reddish-haired man through littered streets to red number 20, a graffiti’d low-income project building, Jackie bluffs entrance to a twenty-fourth-floor booze, dancing and sex party. There she meets waif “from London” April (Natalie Press), her dog and the boyfriend Stevie (Martin Compston) who shares the fledgling locksmith business and flat with Clyde Henderson (Tony Curran).

The bluntly obscene Clyde is piqued when the non-communicative relatively straight visitor frees herself from his dancing clutch and flees. But, out of uniform for once, she soon stalks him to the Broomfield Tavern and, noticing a snapshot of the daughter who believes him dead, into his bed. The sexual act is graphically shown for a theatrical release, unnecessarily so, but it is the woman’s abruptly half-dressing and going to the bathroom -- above all, what she does there -- that is unusual and that will lead to complication, to clarification of motive, to resolution, and finally to reconciliation.

Dickie is good at masking and simultaneously conveying a mixed bag of emotions, but it is the haunted Clyde who gives voice to the key. “She was loved, some people don’t get a lot.” 

(Released by Tartan USA; not rated by MPAA.)