The title Wonderful Town calls up a cross of Frank Capra and Thornton Wilder. Instead, writer-director Aditya Assarat’s feature début turns out Thai Gothic, out of Tennessee Williams or Faulkner. It is crucial to remember that, notwithstanding the notorious sex industry that draws an estimated third of Thailand’s lucrative tourist trade, that kingdom is Buddhist, family-oriented and conservative.

Sporting a few festival selections and awards plus a New York première at this year’s Lincoln Center-MoMA New Directors/New Films, this fiction piece is based on a real town in the south, physically and emotionally devastated by the tsunami. Foamy sea long breaking on a shore to ominous music, would appear to presage that 2004 catastrophe. But it is three years afterwards, so with original guitar music and a bit of piano the ninety-two minutes is visually peaceful; local views are underplayed but bucolic, sun beats on palmed tropical beaches, and water returns only as rain or, even in the abrupt scene of dark dénouement, as a placid river.

Indeed, the story moves too slowly for some, while others were not at ease with the final moments. But auguries of doom are scattered throughout, and despite a lack of full explanation, a bit of inconsistency and two suggestive out-of-place little girls in tutus on a balcony wall, the film is successful in its ironic image of the sleepy yet sinister once-was town that brooks no outsider invaders.

Losing eight thousand lives to the tidal wave, Takua Pa has more or less rebuilt itself, but the tourists have gone to other places such as nearby “Pearl of the South” Phuket on the island-province, and the town remains sunk in a sad torpor of despair. The invader, the stranger of story and legend, is mustached Ton (Supphasit Kansen), a low-level architect “in charge of toilets” who arrives with a pristine stage prop hard hat to speed up delayed construction of a hotel in the more successful city.

Once an aspiring musician, by his own account, then a bar manager and alcoholic, he is alone “with no people or a lot of people,” in the country or in Bangkok, where he bunks at a sister’s and has little to do with their father. The only one willing, let alone wanting, to leave the capital for provincial boredom, he has volunteered for the two-month posting. To save on lodging, and by chance, he registers at a clean but deserted hotel across the main truck route from a gas station.

Inherited from her parents, who lost hope, home and health in the wake of the tsunami, the place was formerly the town’s biggest and brightest and is now dutifully run by Na (Anchalee Saisoontorn). There do not seem many, or any, other guests, but she claims to enjoy a continual round of laundry, making beds, mopping, shopping, hindered as much as helped by Ah Jeck and elderly Ah Ma.

On bicycle, she also picks up young Ah Tee from school. Only later is the natural assumption corrected, that she is a widowed or deserted or unmarried single mother, the reason for quietness that hides hurt. The boy is her nephew, given to her charge by her younger brother Wit (Dul Yaambunying). The name is Thai, so the half- or dimwit pun does not apply, yet the brother seems strange, slow in the abandoned factory where he sleeps and leads four street adolescents.

Na has a shy eye for her hotel guest. Although he occasionally drives to Bangkok and then to her surprise returns, Ton is laid-back in pressing her to sleep with him. Villagers have noticed their keeping company, and are talking, and she is concerned about that. Though not as yet identified, in unspecified menace Wit’s four followers weave motorbikes around the sweethearts out in his Suzuki SUV. Also unprepared for, Wit approaches the architect late, excuses himself as “useless, . . . once a gangster, always a gangster,” partly explains a couple loose ends, and praises his sister Na.

A red-herring “haunted house” thus cleared up as having been their parents’ home, still a vague sense lingers on of something wrong. A happy loving ending would jar, as Ton goes for bottled drinks before singing the words she has asked him to write. We can only surmise whom he cell phones -- and one can justly object that Wit does not even know about it -- but, truer than we would like to think, the village essentially closes ranks.

Irony in the title adjective, and in a T-shirt’s printed “Grand: outstanding/feeling/performance,” Wonderful Town is not without its first-timer’s flaws. But underneath its leisurely pace lies foreboding, as mundane surfaces beg to be shattered. It’s not an exaggeration to note parallels to Shirley Jackson tales like “The Lottery.”

(Released by Kino International; not rated by MPAA.)