Starring Stephanie Cumming. Rating unavailable

Why do Edward Hopper’s paintings haunt us so? His accuracy of fashion, architecture, and body language makes us nostalgic, to be sure. Large fields of undecorated space and unforgiving light invite us to ponder what led those lonely souls to become, say, Nighthawks at the diner (1942).

In this 90-minute experiment, Austrian film historian Gustav Deutsch and cinematographer Jerzy Palacz have captured these ineffable qualities; when spectral figures move across the familiar frames of 13 Hopper paintings created between the ’30s and the ’60s, their gestures seem to effortlessly extend the trajectories of the originals. These beautifully choreographed vignettes provoke more wonderment at what the subjects were thinking at the time. Too bad they don’t leave us wondering.

Curiously, the filmmaker has chosen one performer to anchor every image. Canadian dancer Stephanie Cumming has a flame-haired presence that suggests Jessica Chastain’s more mysterious sister. Unfortunately, Deutsch also has her speak, and Cumming has a flatly affectless modern voice that suggests forgotten shopping lists, whether the material at hand is excerpted from a Thornton Wilder play, a newspaper report about Elia Kazan ratting out friends to Joseph McCarthy, or just banal musings about another person in the room.

Instead of linking the scenes in surprising ways, the filmmaker locks into a deadening format, separating them with chronologically fixed dates supported by a radio announcer reading the latest news about Hitler, the stock market, or Martin Luther King Jr. This has the effect of distracting from the gorgeous images and ultimately deadening their almost metaphysical effect.

Deutsch further clutters the canvas by positing his central figure as an actress, called Shirley, who waltzes agelessly through New York Movie and other deathless frames. But if she’s a figure out of time, that only makes Shirley’s sociopolitical musings more irrelevant. Even if this bad writing were better-read, it would still ruin the contemplative mood of the originals. A few stabs at period music work better than anything in the script. But anyway, it’s not the meaning or the history we love about Hopper; it’s the silence. The people in his paintings are forever between thoughts.