Vancouver filmmaker Carl Bessai makes dark studies of people under pressure. In original, small-scale efforts like Johnny, Lola, and Emile, a few characters battle for their identities, often in claustrophobic circumstances. His latest feature, Normal, boasts his largest cast and most varied emotional palette, and it was written by someone else. But it still smacks of his trademark obsession with guilt, redemption, and the frailty of human connections.

Carrie-Anne Moss headlines the impressive ensemble as a suburban mother grieving the loss of her beloved teenage son. In the tale, filmed on southern Vancouver Island and opening here Friday (February 8), Callum Keith Rennie and Tygh Runyan are brothers who were also in the fatal accident. Michael Riley and Kevin Zegers are a father and son likewise involved.

“It’s a pretty heavy subject,” Bessai admits when reached by cellphone on the set of a new project. “The original idea came from this young guy, Travis McDonald, who had actually watched his friend die, and that terrible experience motivated him to write this script.

“The challenge to me was to balance all these interconnected stories, done in this fragmented style that I guess we associate with Robert Altman’s films. I tried to balance the basic sadness of Carrie-Anne’s story with some of the quirkiness that comes from Callum and Tygh, who get into some goofier stuff.”

Local producers at Brightlight Pictures optioned the script a few years back, and Bessai was eventually hired to bring it to the screen. After working with Ian McKellen in Emile, largely shot in Victoria, he was able to attract Moss and rising star Zegers to this one.

The veteran director, born in Edmonton and schooled in Toronto, previously wrote Severed, an environmental horror film, with McDonald, and he also contributed to the script of the ghost chiller They Wait, which recently opened in Vancouver. Between the family-secret melodramas and bloody cleavers to the head, Bessai confesses that it might be time for him to make a comedy.

He is, indeed, mixing them up with Mothers and Daughters, a collaborative, mostly improvised piece centring on Gabrielle Rose, Babz Chula, and Tantoo Cardinal. (Cardinal also starred in his Unnatural and Accidental, an adapted play briefly seen last year.)

“Certainly, this new thing is a lot lighter,” he says with a relieved-sounding chuckle as crew members rattle lunch utensils in the background. “I won this prize [Citytv Western Canada Feature Film Award] for Normal at last year’s VIFF. It was 12,000 bucks, so, like a good farmer, I thought I’d put that seed back in the ground and see what grows.”

To that end, he’s abandoning much of the measured, carefully crafted, and highly stylized visual approach that has marked his previous work.

“It was three months of workshopping and now we’re in a 10-day guerrilla shoot. It’s three stories about these crazy women and their daughters.

“Hopefully,” he deadpans, “the laughs will be intentional.”