Nymphomaniac is sucking up all the attention, but if it’s real insight into transgressive human behaviour that you’re looking for, The Husband has it beat.

Bruce McDonald’s modest Canadian movie, which opens Wednesday (March 19), is also the queasily funnier of the two films, thanks largely to its star (and cowriter) Maxwell McCabe-Lokos. Playing Henry, whose schoolteacher wife has recently been jailed for seducing a 14-year-old student—only months after becoming a mother—Lokos stoops through the movie like a clinically depressed whippet, or perhaps Groucho Marx after being crushed by the weight of the world and a touch of consumption.

“I’m a big believer in physical casting,” McCabe-Lokos tells the Straight, in a call from Toronto. “That’s important for me, to have a grotesque clown aspect of it. I think it’s more authentic. I don’t think it’s as poetic to have, ‘Oh, woe is me, I’m going to read Sartre and listen to Leonard Cohen.’ Life’s way more clumsy and ugly than that, and I tried to play it in a way that was aware of the comic nature of the pathos and the vulnerability of the character.”

As such, Henry is like a gravity well at the centre of The Husband; a pitiful figure who looks, as McCabe-Lokos puts it, like “a small person crunched down by the world around him”. He continues: “Somebody else did something wrong, and they’re dealing with it in isolation, and you’re the one whose face is associated with it, you know? It’s apologizing for somebody else’s crimes that is so taxing to him, and it’s the shame. The absolute shame. It’s the old-fashioned thing of: you just got stepped over by a kid who maybe doesn’t even have pubes yet.”

Right, that old-fashioned thing! This changes when Henry spots and begins stalking his wife’s maybe pubeless junior lover, at which point The Husband becomes a queasily funny thriller built around “the aimless hunt of this kid and the ambiguity of what he’s going to do with him.” Quips McCabe-Lokos: “Is he gonna fuck him or is he gonna buy him a Nintendo, you know?”

In the end, The Husband succeeds by extending a little sympathy toward all of its characters, even while they’re messing up, badly. Playing Henry’s wife, Alyssa, actor Sarah Allen gives subtle depth to a woman incapable of understanding her own actions and resigned to paying the price.

“But the whole point of the movie,” McCabe-Lokos offers, “and the whole source of Henry’s frustration, is that there’s no answer, is that he can’t solve the problem. He’s trying to solve a problem that is unsolvable. What he wants to do is make it that it didn’t happen, or make it that the kid drugged her or raped her. That’s what he wants. Then he can beat up the kid and his wife is innocent and everything is done. But neither of those things are going to happen.”

Meanwhile, as for any further comparisons to Lars von Trier’s contemporaneous, five-hour assault on decorum, McCabe-Lokos says he’s satisfied that “we pushed the buttons just enough.”