Edie Falco and Jay Duplass in Outside In (The Orchard)

After serving a 20-year prison sentence for a seemingly misunderstood crime, Chris, played with beautiful restraint by Jay Duplass, is finally free. Yet life outside still feels barren. Though physical freedom brings about brief moments of refreshing air, Chris quickly finds himself suffocated by loneliness. The outside world has changed and moved on without him, and he doesn’t know what to make of it.

Chris attempts to reconnect with his high school English teacher Carol, played by the always emotionally intense and brilliant Edie Falco, who had been corresponding with Chris in prison. Carol’s own personal life feels barren, too. Her marriage is bereft of any intimacy, and her daughter, Hildy (Kaitlyn Dever), remains distant. The story ultimately becomes a low-key, but at times redundant, back-and-forth between Chris pleading for Carol’s love and Carol saying she just wants to be friends and Chris taking a break to hang out with Hildy, who, unsurprisingly, fancies Chris.

Some of the plot points ultimately feel drawn out in this way. For example, how many times do we really need to see Carol and Chris engaged in clandestine phone calls, interspersed with sexually tense pauses, only to see each other the next day acting as if everything is normal? There comes a point where the whole theme of yearning intimacy is forcefully overplayed. But despite the occasional pitfall into clichés, Outside In veers away from love triangle territory, which is refreshing.

It also incorporates its setting beautifully. Set in a small blue-collar town in Washington, the rain-drenched streets and wet chipped pavements, run down and shabby interiors, and economically barren aura accompany the desolation and aimlessness in the characters. And director Lynn Shelton captures it all with poignant sincerity. The story is also bolstered by Duplass’s and Falco’s powerful performances. Duplass plays Chris with a surprising amount of wittiness and charm, and Falco, as usual, knows how to draw that perfect line between the reactive and the restrained.