Two kids — a boy of 11, and a girl of 9, brother and sister, apparent runaways — drag a duffel bag into a crumbly, seemingly abandoned house. Now they live there. No one seems to be looking for them, and they offer no explanation as to where they came from or why they ran away. They could as likely be aliens as lost little children. It’s almost as if they’ve drifted off into another realm, some kind of Oz.

The first half of David Lowery’s feature directorial debut St. Nick is devoted to the ways in which this family unit spends their days building a life in their new home. Procuring provisions for cheese sandwiches, salvaging furniture, fixing the toilet. Arguing about the fate of the dog they left behind, and whether or not he misses his under-age owners. Virtually wordless for long stretches of time, St. Nick relies heavily on contemplative imagery to convey meaning –– particularly, the clear-lit landscape or a Texas winter in juxtaposition with the pink-and-white faces of his two young stars, real-life siblings Tucker and Savanna Sears. As both types of images, both equally beautiful and mysterious, become increasingly gray, the film matures from a study of actions infused with a quiet magic, to a study of inaction, of waiting and drifting telegraphing an increasingly palpable sense of fear and dread.

Those who have some film festival familiarity with Lowery’s most recent short film, the largely stop-motion A Catalog of Anticipations, may be surprised by his methods here (including many long, slow, fixed, often wide shots), and how long he takes to establish their patterns. In some ways, the title of the short is applicable to the feature: Lowery literally catalogs his character’s movements, showing in painstaking detail how the kids take on some perversion of traditional male and female roles (without anything doing perverted): the boy playing fix-it, building a home by any means necessary and available to him; the girl playing mother to their new “pet” (the decayed skeleton of what used to be a dog). You wait for something to happen, and then you realize that it’s happening — St. Nick reveals itself as a string of vignettes about two lost souls old enough to get themselves lost and enjoy it, but too young to be able to fully grasp the length and obstacles of the road ahead to the point where they, like we, know to wait for the other shoe to drop. They don’t try to get a TV, or comics, or toys. They seem happy to do nothing but what they need to do to maintain their lives. We become comfortable with being with the brother and sister in each heightened moment, whether she’s crafting the world largest, messiest dessert sandwich, or he’s stumbling on a woman playing guitar on her porch and subsequently falling into some kind of love. And then suddenly Lowery gives his characters steeper stakes.

St. Nick would make for an intriguing triple feature with two other recent lyrical kids-on-their-own indies, Children of Invention and Treeless Mountain. In those films, the circumstances that lead to the siblings’ separation from parents leaves an imprint — a resentment, a frustration, a determination to get along with or without adults. In St. Nick, our unnamed brother and sister share only that determination, and increasingly, the sister seems like she’d be just as happy at home playing with the dog, with dinner guaranteed. In Children and Treeless, we meet sibling pairs in which the eldest takes on the de facto role of the little adult out of particularly dire necessity. In St. Nick, we meet a sibling pair where the eldest has created a condition of dire necessity in order to prove himself as an adult. The tragic irony is that, as a self-destructive hero in a Western of his own making, he’s mired in necessarily childish make-believe.

This review originally appeared during the 2009 SXSW Film Festival. St. Nick screens tonight in New York at Rooftop Films. See also David Lowery’s recent blog post about sitting in a waiting room with Steven Soderbergh.