Starring Fanny Mallette and Sébastien Ricard. In French, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable.

Quebec writer-director François Delisle, who recently brought us a small gem called Félix & Meira, returns with the thornier Chorus, a tale of grief and reconciliation that gets hazy a few times during an otherwise assured character study in deep-focus black-and-white.

Like Boychoir, this French-Canadian effort uses choral music as a metaphor for communion, but similarities end there in this unremittingly sober affair. Fanny Mallette is superb as Irene, a sedate Montrealer who has thrown herself into singing madrigals and various churchly exhortations after the sudden disappearance, 10 years earlier, of her small son.

Around that time, she split from husband Christophe (Sébastien Ricard) and he’s since moved to Mexico, where he lives moment to moment on a lush beach. Both the jungle and the crashing waves look even more mysterious with a monochrome palette. And this contrasts hypnotically with snowy Quebec at Christmastime, when Christophe is suddenly called home.

In the film’s remarkably sustained opening sequence, a middle-aged pedophile (Luc Senay), already in prison, confesses to killing the boy, then eight. This sets in motion an uncomfortable reunion for the parents, still awash in guilt and recrimination, some of which Irene seems to reserve for her mother, played by Geneviève Bujold, whose ashen features align perfectly with Mallette’s broad, pliable face. Christophe has a much easier relationship with his obviously lonely father (Pierre Curzi).

Very little back story is given for these relationships, and it’s not needed, given the strength of the performers and the spell cast by Delisle, who also shot and edited the extended mood piece. That’s why it’s disappointing when he gilds (perhaps even tarnishes) the lily by intermittently putting their thoughts on the audio track. These add nothing, but are better than the old Hollywood trick of having the absent son show up in ghostly form. The kid even looks a little like Haley Joel Osment.