This was written and directed by David Lowery, to whom I give bonus points for originality.

A young man, Casey Affleck, accepts blame for wounding a police officer in some tiny retro town in Missouri, although it was his lover, Mara Rooney, who did the shooting. After a few years in the slams, Affleck crashes out and heads towards home, determine to see his girl friend, who still loves him, and his little girl. The cop, who doesn't know who shot him, falls for Rooney and the girl and thinks of them as his family. Everyone in town, including the police, soon learns that the fugitive is on his way. Guess what happens?

The central idea -- lawbreaker wittingly heads towards forbidden place for personal reasons -- is hardly new. There are echoes of "One False Move," "Bonny and Clyde", "Falling Down," and "Behold a Pale Horse."

What IS new is the treatment. It's all slow and deliberate. Nobody makes wisecracks during action scenes. The musical score doesn't blitz us with electronic noise. The editing is thoughtful enough to let us see what's going on, instead of being the usual maddening instantaneous clips. The acting is restrained, subtle. People think before they speak. And there is a near absence of gore. When Affleck shoots an attacker, it's a medium shot in a river at night.

One might carp that the whole project is too dark, which it is. Missouri must never see the sun. But that's a minor thing. It does drag at times and, given the climax, it's rather like watching a fuse slowly sputtering towards a stack of dynamite that never really explodes. There are some loose ends too. I don't know what the title means or where that buried box of treasure came from.

I've never warmed up to Casey Affleck. There's always something about to burst out of him when he uses that cracked, whiny voice. I keep waiting for him to bop somebody over the sconce with a baseball bat. But his screen persona fits the role of the laid-back Southern boy just fine.

Mara Rooney is as fixed to her role as an enzyme to its substrate. She's a wan, pretty, contralto. If she doesn't smile, it's because the doesn't have much to smile about. Ben Foster, as the once-wounded policeman, now would-be husband, is a strict nonentity in the looks department and that's just great. He's convincing as hell as the sincere and perceptive second male lead.

Daniel Hart did the musical score. The melancholy music -- no tunes -- is heard almost constantly but it doesn't interfere with the narrative because it comes in long sheets of drawn-out chords with occasional syncopated hand-clapping or violin plucking. Carter Burwell and my man Philip Glass draw from the same spring.

If you begin to watch it, stick with it for a while. Adult sensibilities may take a little getting used to, after all the garbage polluting our screens these days. This one doesn't even have a car chase and there is not a SINGLE VAMPIRE in sight.

Deeply indebted to Terrence Malick's style. So much so, it never really becomes its own thing (unlike, say, Beasts of the Southern Wild, which had so much of its own energy Malick's name never popped up in my mind until long afterward). Fortunately, the performances in it are so good that it's quite worthwhile. Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara star as a couple who get caught up in criminal activities. The two are caught, Affleck goes to prison and Mara gets acquitted. She gives birth to their daughter, and the two live comfortably under the protection of Keith Carradine and, after a while, a police officer (Ben Foster) who harbors a crush on her. When the child is around 4, Affleck escapes from jail and goes looking for his old girlfriend. All four of the principle actors are fantastic. Mara, whose Oscar nominated performance in The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo is one of the few I've skipped in the last few years (I loathed the Swedish original),has blown me away between this and Side Effects. She is the real deal. Affleck unfortunately never became the huge star he deserved to be after The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (that was six years ago!). I really wish his brother Ben would've cast him instead of himself in his last two films (it's one of the reasons that, in my opinion, Gone Baby Gone remains Ben Affleck's best film as a director). Foster, too, deserves to be a bigger star, with Oscar caliber performances in The Messenger and 3:10 to Yuma. I wish the film were a bit more original, but the acting really does sell it.

Writer/director David Lowery has gathered a superb cast of actor to explore a rather simple story, a cinematic folksong in the western sense (the film is set in the 1970s but could easily be timeless so far reaching are the themes): quite simply it is the tale of an outlaw who escapes from prison and sets out across the Texas hills to reunite with his wife and the daughter he has never met.

Bob Muldoon (Casey Affleck) and his wife/girlfriend Ruthie Guthrie (Rooney Mara) and their kin Freddy (Kentucker Audley) have been 'raised' by a man named Skerritt (Keith Carradine) and are bank robbers. In their latest attempt Freddy is killed and Ruthie shoots at and wounds Sheriff Patrick Wheeler (Ben Foster),but to protect his pregnant wife Bob takes the blame and is sent to prison for four years. Bob writes Ruth daily and longs to be reunited with her and their new daughter Sylvie and escapes the prison by cajoling a guard. Escaping means walking and hitchhiking with a young lad named Will (another impressive turn for Rami Malek). Bob finds a Gilead with Sweetie (Nate Parker) but is determined despite the odds to walk his way back to Ruthie as he had promised. Ruthie meanwhile is making do, raising Sylvie on her own, has been given a house by Skerritt, and is courted by the Sheriff she shot (he does not know that the shooter was Ruthie). There is as much silence in the film as there is dialogue, the characters meditating on the fragility of love and the sense of unpredictable fate. The ending is deeply moving.

Bradford Young provides the hypnotic cinematography, allowing the story to unfold gradually (if a bit too long under Lowery's direction). The performances are all memorable, but it is that of Rooney Mara who likely will be in the running for awards. But foremost it is the concept and the technique of cinematic experimental excellence that makes this film a jewel, the work of an important new artist in David Lowery.

Grady Harp