Starring Jesuthasan Antonythasan. In French, English, and Tamil, with English subtitles. Rated 14A.

The superb first half of this fish-in-two-waters drama is so packed with fresh, tender insights, it’s a shock when the art-house-aimed Dheepan suddenly goes full Neeson, complete with explosions, gunfights, and an ending far too facile for what has gone before.

The taciturn Sri Lankan refugee capable of Liam-like ass-kicking is a Tamil Tiger played compellingly by Jesuthasan Antonythasan, himself a former child soldier who became an acclaimed French playwright after escaping his civil-war-wracked land. Here, in a prologue set during the brutal denouement of that conflict, his dazed fighter assumes the name of a dead comrade and quickly finds an ignorant village girl (Kalieaswari Srinivasan) with the nerve to grab a nine-year-old orphan (instantly lovable Claudine Vinasithamby) so they can emigrate in a hurry.

This ad hoc trio’s dissimulation gets them all the way to Paris, where Dheepan snags a job as caretaker of a crumbling suburban tower block. His improvisatory survival skills prove useful, covering his lack of language and emotional expression, and they drift toward making this ersatz unit a real one. But the Paris projects have their own war going on, mostly involving drug deals in the next building over, and this eventually infects the Tamils and other immigrants trying to forget troubles back home.

Writer-director Jacques Audiard already attained worldwide attention for fatalistic dramas like A Prophet and Rust and Bone. And this received the top prize in Cannes last year. But the subject must have overwhelmed him, and he simply loaded the second half with extra conflict because, well, that’s what filmmakers do. The fact that the “daughter”, having become the crucial link between strangers, completely disappears for the last quarter suggests that he overlooked his story’s tensile core: the tenacity of impoverished refugees to find their own ways, and each other, in the face of utter dislocation. Revenge is one luxury they, and we, can truly live without.