Directed by Bruce McDonald. Starring Maxwell McCabe-Lokos and Sarah Allen. Rated 14A.

In Notes on a Scandal, Cate Blanchett played an English schoolteacher having a compulsive affair with an underaged student. Quick: name the actor who played her husband! It was Bill Nighy, who’s usually pretty memorable. That rather-be-under-a-rock scenario is exactly what drives The Husband, a dark character study from veteran director Bruce McDonald (Pontypool, Hard Core Logo).

Cowritten by producer Kelly Harms and Lars and the Real Girl actor Maxwell McCabe-Lokos, it stars the latter as Henry, an ad-agency writer so beaten down by his current shame, he avoids his coworkers’ eyes. When we first see him, he’s changing a tire, baby in the back seat, on the way to visit his wife (Being Human’s Sarah Allen), a teacher in jail for shtupping a 14-year-old. He spends some time with her thin-lipped father (Stephen McHattie), but mostly suffers in silence, only getting inspired when he bumps into his wife’s minilover (Dylan Authors) by chance, and decides to follow the boy—for no good reason.

As played by the hollow-eyed McCabe-Lokos, the guy’s too screwed up to garner much sympathy; everyone (including Henry) wonders what he did to bring this on himself. His dilemma is shock-edited like an indie comedy, but McDonald and cinematographer Daniel Grant stick to a cold blue palette, and mix stark, disorienting images with reassuring Toronto landmarks, like Honest Ed’s and the Art Gallery of Ontario (to go with tunes by the Tragically Hip and others). There are also intriguing side characters played by Germany’s August Diehl (Counterfeit ) and South Africa–born Jodi Balfour (Bomb Girls), although everyone is sketchily drawn. After only 80 minutes, it’s hard to decide exactly what the filmmakers want to make you feel about Henry, and his wounded masculine pride, but they do make this Husband pretty hard to forget.