Dreamy and hypnotic

Leady, rural New Jersey, late summer. Fin (Peter Dinklage), a handsome man born with dwarfism, walks into a sleepy, lakeside town to check out the semi-derelict train depot left to him in a friend's will. Having nowhere better to go, he holes up in this depot, misanthropic and wordless.

The neighbours are curious. A young café owner (Bobby Cannavale; neanderthal, passionate) and an artist (Patricia Clarkson; neat, sardonic) find themselves drawn to the depot. They make friends with Fin almost against his will, talking at him for most of the movie, cooking him lamb chops, bringing him whisky. The plot is busy (fighting in bars, chasing trains, a marriage well and truly busting up) but you are never put through some bogus emotional wringer; the film just slips along, always in rhythm, always cool and funny.

The Station Agent knocked them out in America, particularly at the Sundance film festival, and, rightly, a big deal has been made there of the talented Dinklage. His face is so soft and yet has a deep margin of distrust to it: he is perfectly cast as a man who wants to be left alone to read and smoke.

Fin rolls his own cigarettes - hundreds, it feels, over the course of the movie - and puffs on them in a particularly loving way. Each drag is a little kiss. "I'm really quite a boring guy," he tells his pals - kiss, kiss. They seem as mesmerised by his few words as they are by the fagtomouth action. Us, too.

Dinklage is a star, for sure, but the film is hypnotic because of its unusually certain and constantly delicate tone.

First-time director/writer Tom McCarthy gets the atmosphere just so and keeps it that way, holding us and softly squeezing. He is no capering show-off, but a film-maker with a real instinct for capturing his characters' largely smothered feelings. In interviews, he claims, of course, that his Station Agent is a never-to-be-repeated fluke, but this is rot. The pizzazz here is a combination of natural skill and pure alchemy.

The Station Agent
Cert: 15