‘Friends and Strangers’ Review: G’day, Mates

The opening credits of “Friends and Strangers,” a funny, productively cryptic debut feature from James Vaughan, unfold over a series of watercolors painted during the first years of Australia’s colonization; they are synced to a score from a silent film, and the first shot after they end seems inspired by the pointillist Georges Seurat. All of this might be taken as an invitation to look beyond dialogue, to pay attention to gaps.

Nearly every scene in this ultra-low-key cringe comedy involves people behaving with varying degrees of over- and under-chumminess. Alice (Emma Diaz) and her friend Ray (Fergus Wilson) drive separately to a campground. Almost immediately, a bewhiskered fellow camper persistently advises them to move their tent, and a girl, Lauren (Poppy Jones), assumes Ray is Alice’s romantic interest (a mistake that Ray may share). Soon Lauren is offering Alice articles of clothing from her dead mother, an act of queasily intimate hospitality that is a hallmark of Vaughan’s characters.

When the action relocates to the Sydney area, the sense of Australia as a big, passive-aggressive small town only grows more pronounced. Ray and his pal Miles (David Gannon) drive to a wedding-videography gig (which Ray plans to bluff his way through) only for Miles to develop food poisoning and take refuge not at their destination, but at the house next door.

True to its title, “Friends and Strangers” is a movie of opposites. Motives are misread. A scenic waterfront home is rendered ominous by the avant-garde string music that an ambiguously hostile neighbor blasts at high volume. Ray makes an effort to go unnoticed that increases his visibility.

While the pieces don’t necessarily fit in obvious ways, that’s presumably the point — and part of what makes “Friends and Strangers” so singular.

Friends and Strangers
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. In theaters and on Metrograph’s virtual cinema.