Junebug’s atmosphere of suppressed drama is as if one is looking at a placid mountain lake: the surface waters are still as can be, but onlookers can easily see the darkness and depths agitating right underneath. First-time director Phil Morrison, who lets his stellar cast sink naturally into Angus MacLachlan’s slyly unassuming screenplay wonderfully sustains this tone throughout the work. A basic premise fraught with the ambiguity of everyday life and situations, Junebug follows cosmopolitan gallery owner Madeleine (Embeth Davidtz) and her new husband of six months, George (Alessandro Nivola), as they travel to a North Carolina town to seduce an eccentric rural artist into showing at Madeline's gallery in Chicago. George’s family also happens to live close by, so he takes Madeline to meet them.

The small-town family’s reactions to the urbanized Madeleine range from distrustful (Celia Weston, as George’s mother), to uncaring (Benjamin McKenzie as George’s brother), passively embracing (Scott Wilson, George’s father), and enthusiastically joyful (Amy Adams as George’s sister-in-law). Though the film at first seems to follow Madeleine’s awkwardness at meeting this Southern family, the couple’s discomfited arrival sparks unanswered questions about the solidarity of all the various couples in the film. While Adams’ bright and particularly refreshing turn as the token Southern optimist is the surface heart of the film, little tragedies course along underneath the narrative and between the extended family—marital (Adams is pregnant and her husband is bitter and distant), social xenophobia, fraternal (George and his brother share a wordless, unexplained grudge throughout the film), solitary (the father withdraws from familial conflict) and narrative (the film starts with Madeleine’s at-first-sight attraction to her husband, but George’ character is almost completely elided in the film, and they seem only to have a physical relationship).

Despite its visual plainness, Morrison’s film is wonderfully tentative in its exploration, as if always wanting to feel out just what these people are about, or what each one’s story is, without ever really finding out at all. When Madeleine attends a church pot-luck and watches her husband sing a hymn, the look on her face, showing surprise both at George’s faith filled roots and his ability as a singer, is one of a number of scenes that seem so simple, but that each gradually point to unresolved, unspoken things existing between people who supposedly know each other well. Adams’ character’s cheery, unfailing acceptance at face-value of George’s return home and Madeleine as an individual person is the most admirable thing in the film, but her optimism fails to infect those around her. If anything, she is the one who makes her household, and this film, bearable amidst the quiet desperation. Tremendously acted and unexpectedly fascinating, Junebug resonates with the intrinsic mysteries of social group, from something as large as the South to smaller units—families—and even the couples and solitary individuals within them.