The only thing that bugs writer-director Thomas McCarthy about his new movie, The Visitor, is that some people don’t quite get it. Actually, scratch that thought. He isn’t really mad when people throw stones at this small tale about lives changed by chance encounters, because he thinks his critics might still be interested in furthering the discussion he wanted to start in the first place.

In fact, reviews of his second film (which opens in Vancouver on Friday, April 25) have been even more positive than those for his first, 2003’s The Station Agent. And the young filmmaker—perhaps better known to TV audiences as an actor on the well-regarded series The Wire—suspected he was heading for trouble when he took on a tale about a middle-aged college professor (Six Feet Under’s great Richard Jenkins) who returns to Manhattan to find a Muslim couple living in his long-vacant apartment. He doesn’t kick them out, exactly, but the tensions between them, and with the outside world, form the crux of the quietly affecting story.

“By and large, I’m super happy with the response to the film,” says McCarthy on the line from Minneapolis, Minnesota. “Of course, I knew that making a movie like this, as soon as I introduced any kind of sociopolitical angle, I was going to take my hits. And if someone sees this movie and cannot find any kind of emotional connection with it, then this is where the conversation has to start.”

The main complaint has been that McCarthy’s story does not stay focused on the immigrant couple but studies the professor’s gradual identification with their plight.

“There was a reason I addressed this subtly and didn’t make it a huge issue movie like Rendition. Not everybody behaves perfectly—people are sometimes mistreated in this country—and how do we feel about that?

“Some people have said, ‘You could have gone a lot farther and shown the abuse that happens at detention centres when these people are caught.’ But I thought, ‘You know, we need to start at a much simpler place than that.’ There’s a very specific reason that I chose to tell the story from the white guy’s perspective: so Americans would have an entrée into another way of seeing the world. There’s a tricky emotional arc; it is, in a way, about becoming a better person because of his encounter with the so-called Third World.”

In any case, the reviews have been nearly universal in their praise for Jenkins in the lead role and for the craft of the film itself, which is masterful in its economy.

“I wrote this so it could be told in pictures and sound even more than words, so its rhythm would carry you along.”

It’s fitting that McCarthy makes two of the main characters musicians who remain sensitive to the rhythms around them. By dropping language, they find a better way to speak.