Alberta hasn’t exactly been overrepresented in Canadian film. Edmontonian Anne Wheeler and Calgarian Gary Burns have put Prairie life on the big screen, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a movie as thick with indigenous atmosphere as the Drumheller-set The Valley Below, opening Friday (March 6).

Written and directed by Calgary’s Kyle Thomas, this feature-length debut imparts an intimate knowledge of the colourless suburban new builds and strip-mall aesthetics, the faintly desperate rhythms of the badlands, and the modest interior lives of its fictional inhabitants.

“I went to film school in Montreal and I decided to come back to Calgary. A lot of people were like, ‘What? You left Montreal?’ But these are the stories I want to tell, and the landscape I want to put the characters in is out there, not here,” Thomas says, calling the Straight from Toronto just hours before he’s set to walk the red carpet at the Canadian Screen Awards. “Somebody’s gotta dedicate the time to doing it! A lot of actors, a lot of musicians, they leave just because there’s not a lot of work or they want something bigger, so there’s not a lot of people that end up staying in Calgary to actually foster something. I wanted to go back and at least give it a shot.”

Thomas’s strategy was to cofound the media-arts collective North Country Cinema in 2005. Topping an impressive roster of shorts, The Valley Below certainly makes a bold statement with its austere, character-driven plotting, which follows a small group of interconnected characters through a year of unwanted pregnancies, failing marriages, and other familiar ups and downs.

“Cassavetes would be an influence, for sure,” Thomas states. “I thought I was gonna be an actor forever, so I worked in theatre when I was young, and that is my background. I’ve always appreciated performance, so when I was introduced to John Cassavetes, I was like, ‘Wow, he’s getting it right.’ But I was also a big David Lynch fan for a while. A lot of my shorts were very sound-design-heavy, darker, very atmospheric, so with this movie I returned to the roots of performance.”

That said, The Valley Below has atmosphere to spare, thanks in large part to an original soundtrack featuring some of the moodiest music that Rae Spoon, Dan Mangan, and Wooden Sky’s Gavin Gardiner have ever put their names to. Calgary’s singing poet laureate, Kris Demeanor, also contributes on both sides of the camera, performing his own number in the guise of a substance-abusing Zamboni driver named Warren. If casting the nonactor was a gamble that happens to work, it points to Thomas’s bid for verisimilitude and his loyalty to homegrown talent.

“I think he’s probably a hyperbolized version of Kris,” Thomas muses. “Kris is more successful than Warren, but when I was casting that, I thought I needed someone who’d been on tour and slept in the van, who’d experienced that grittier side of things and would be able to bring that to the character. That’s why I chose to go with a musician. This is Kris’s first film, but he didn’t have to reach too far.”