(With Sundance wrapped and an intimidating backlog of films to write about, I’ll be publishing a number of brief capsule reviews over the next few days. If a specific title piques your interest and you’d like to see a more substantial review, let me know in the comments.)

The MIssing Person is a present-day film noir starring Oscar nominee Michael Shannon as a private detective hired to find a man who worked in the Twin Towers. The third feature by writer/director Noah Buschel, Shannon stars as John Rosow, a hard-drinking private detective hired by an unseen lawyer to take a train from Chicago to Los Angeles to follow a mysterious man who’s heading West with a young Mexican child in tow. Along the way, Rosow phone-flirts with the lawyer’s tough-girl secretary (Amy Ryan), gets waylaid by a sexy decoy (Margaret Colin), and befriends a cabbie (John Ventimiglia) who, like him, grew up in New York but had to get away. It eventually emerges the detective and his prey are running from similar things.

Floating between Rosow’s desaturated waking life, his surreal, deeply beautiful dreams and his blurry, boozy in-between, Person calls to mind a subset of post-World War II, nuclear panic film noir, of which Kiss Me Deadly (1955) is the key example. The film plays as a conceptual experiment, almost a Far From Heaven-esque revisionist cinematic essay. Just as it took years for popular cinema to absorb the shock of the A-bomb and spit the resultant anxieties out into genre films, Buschel seems to be saying, any real expression of collective psychic post-9/11 trauma should manifest itself not in big-Hollywood biopics about Everyday Heroes or big-star recognition bait about New Yorkers Doing The Best They Can, but in genres that naturally play closer to existential anxieties.

But where Todd Haynes makes his critique of Douglas Sirk by grafting the liminal gay subtext onto the top level, Buschel works his cinematic references into the narrative. In other words: though the characters in Far From Heaven can’t go see All That Heaven Allows, in The Missing Person, Rosow is clearly aware of his hard-boiled cinematic predecessors. One of his clients accuses Rosow of hiding behind old-fashioned detective cliches — the flask, the cigarettes, the Bogart-esque wisecracks — and these are all affectations learnt from the movies, coping mechanisms for an antebellum age lived in fallout from an incident of spectacular, extremely efficient human extermination, and with the vague fear that something worse could be on the horizon. If the Buschel’s dialogue is at once over-stylized and a bit too on the nose (“One day I was one person, then there were the explosions, then I was another person”), Shannon and his extremely capable co-stars sell it with laconic ease.

On first viewing, I’m not quite sure how much depth there is to Person that can’t be read right off the surface, but that surface seems rich enough to warrant a second look. High concept but low in narrative pay off, what’s most compelling about the film is its mood: like its protagonist, it’s slow-moving, unsettlingly even-tempered, and seemingly stuck in midair between everything and nothing. It’s all conveyed in the shots of palm trees peeking up behind Rosow’s cross-country train, the endless horizontal loop of desert landscape on a long tail down to Mexico. It’s beautiful dread.