Emily Watson and Paul Mescal in God’s Creatures (A24)

In directors Saela Davis and Anna Rose Holmer’s bleakly beautiful but ultimately frustrating new film, Aileen O’Hara (Emily Watson) supervises the female workers at a local seafood processing plant in an isolated and hidebound Irish fishing community. Life here is hardscrabble and tough. It also can be dangerous, especially when the sea catches an unwary fisherman. Taking a cigarette break outside, the women watch an ambulance driving down to the harbor, gradually realizing that it has come to retrieve the drowned body of a coworker’s son.

At the pub following the funeral where Aileen, her husband, Con (Declan Conlon), and their daughter, Erin (Toni O’Rourke), are paying their respects to the grieving mother, Aileen becomes radiant when she spots her son Brian (an enigmatic Paul Mezcal), who has just returned from several years in Australia. Amid the gathering’s solemn faces and black clothing, their joyful embrace, more like between lovers than mother and son, is almost unseemly. “Why are you back?” Con abruptly asks Brian. Although it’s clear that there are tensions between the two, the script never delves into Brian’s reasons for leaving Ireland. Brian confidently tells his father that he plans to restart his grandfather’s moribund oyster business. Aileen, having renewed the old oyster license over the years, is thrilled, but Con is more realistic: “It will be a year before you turn a profit. You’ll have to find another living.” For the film’s first third, the camera follows Brian as he works the oyster beds and embarks, to his father’s displeasure, on some shady side hustles, including poaching salmon.

But Aileen indulges her son, paying for his drinks at the pub and even committing a bit of larceny by stealing oyster bags for him from work. When the two go out to the local fancy bar, they run into Sarah Murphy (Aisling Franciosi from The Nightingale), a co-worker of Aileen’s and a former flame of Brian’s. As Aileen leaves them alone to go home, Sarah brushes off Brian, “It was so long ago. Don’t get your hopes up.”

Soon after, a middle-of-the night phone call causes Aileen to drive to the police station: Sarah has charged Brian with sexual assault. Can Aileen confirm her son was with her all evening as Brian claims? Without hesitation, Aileen lies. The following (and the strongest) section focuses on Aileen as she discovers that her prodigal son might not be the man she had believed him to be. Watson’s affecting performance as a mother caught in a moral quandary by familial love recalls her breakthrough role in Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves, but, alas, the deliberately paced God’s Creatures lacks that film’s devastating impact.

Although the experimental percussion score by composers Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans meshes strikingly with sound designer Chris Foster’s evocative crashing waves and clattering oyster shells to build a growing sense of dread, it takes almost 40 minutes before the plot kicks in. It is also difficult to get a sense of the characters, due to Shane Crowley’s chilly screenplay (from a story by himself and Fodhla Cronin O’Reilly). Crowley’s protagonists are seen from a distance, their complex interior lives only hinted at in a few telling scenes.

This remoteness also blunts the emotional impact of the final act when the perspective, in a jarring transition after a key climatic scene, shifts to Sarah. The viewer is left stranded, unsure of what to feel about these remote characters, despite the haunting, and possibly hopeful, conclusion. Kudos, however, to cinematographer Chayse Irvin’s muted palette of grays, browns, and greens that capture the somber gloominess of a windswept Irish fishing village.