Directed by Radu Muntean. In Romanian, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable

In Otto Preminger’s 1944 classic Laura, the absence of the title character drives men mad. Something similar, if less noirish, happens in Romania’s slyly told One Floor Below. This Laura is never directly seen, in flashbacks or giant paintings (as in the earlier film), but she is heard by one Sandu Patrascu, a burly neighbour played by generic-looking but quietly powerful Teodor Corban.

Walking his dog past Laura’s door in their sun-dappled Bucharest apartment block, he hears the young woman yelling at someone in an increasingly violent confrontation. The door opens and out steps a shifty-looking dude who eyeballs Sandu watching him. Guess what: the married Vali (Iulian Postelnicu) also lives in the building.

Sandu’s business helps people navigate the tricky, government-run car-insurance business. When he gets home from work, he learns that Laura has died under suspicious circumstances. Yet he says nothing about the earlier encounter to his wife and business partner (Oxana Moravec) or their young son (Ionut Bora). He tells even less to police.

When Vali finds he hasn’t been fingered, he begins ingratiating himself into the Patrascus’ bourgeois equilibrium. First hanging out with their technology-obsessed boy, he then brings them his car business, allowing us to see the pleasant life Sandu maybe thinks he has to lose.

That “maybe” is because veteran writer-director Radu Muntean never clarifies his characters’ motivations. In its quiet accretion of everyday details, with key events happening off-screen or on the obscure margins, the beautifully shot tale is equal parts Dostoyevsky and Chantal Akerman. Sandu’s ironic cellphone ring is the voice of late dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, so is the movie about how ordinary people accommodate terror, even after it’s gone? Or is this more like the legend of the Kitty Genovese murder, during which at least 38 New Yorkers purportedly “didn’t want to get involved”? As the older movie’s theme song suggested, these questions remain “footsteps that you hear down the hall”.