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"I love my wife, Arnold... We have two beautiful kids, and I'm just getting to know them."

The Clearing is a splendid kidnapping thriller, but its craftsmanship might obscure a subtle, affecting meditation on loss and redemption. This is a fascinating film, indulging in some genre conventions, obscuring others, all the while dabbling in complex emotions and gamely accepting some difficult thematic challenges. It doesn't have all the answers, but it's touching in the sympathetic, mournful way it asks the questions. The characters are put through hell before our eyes, yet we feel like they've already lost more than we can know.

But yes, the film should entertain on a simple thriller level as well. There is suspense in the uncertain fate of Wayne Hayes (Robert Redford), an aging businessman kidnapped by an unhappy ex-employee named Arnold (Willem Dafoe). Perhaps more riveting still are the tribulations of Wayne's semi-estranged wife Eileen (Helen Mirren), who grieves, worries, remembers, contemplates, and is eventually tapped to deliver the ransom. Directed with a sure hand by Peter Jan Brugge, who makes his debut after a decorous career as a producer, the kidnapping plot appropriately builds momentum as revelations are made and the plot unravels.

Moreover, the movie's two-tier structure adds a whole new level of tension to the proceedings; I'm not sure I've ever seen it done quite this way before. There are essentially two storylines here: one involves the actual kidnapping of Wayne Hayes, and the other addresses the ramifications of this on his wife and family. Though these are presumably parallel storylines, the film shifts them just so; it doesn't make them consecutive or employ a flashback structure, but they are consistently dissynchronous, such that we are never quite sure where specific scenes fit in the general scheme or what has or hasn't already happened in the other story at any given point. Savvy viewers will be able to guess what this must ultimately mean, but there's more to it than even that; the framework has a neat way of making us feel like we're hanging precariously in the air.

But though the plot may have thriller trappings, the dialogue has little of the labored exposition and businesslike demeanor that would normally go along wit them. The conversation somehow inevitably veers back to loss and regret, with its characters sadly, sometimes indirectly, lamenting things they've lost or allowed to pass them by. In the opening scenes, Wayne whines about the prospect of having some acquaintances over for dinner; "he used to be your good friend," his wife reminds him. Later, when Wayne is a mysterious no-show and Eileen must make her apologies, there is an uncomfortable moment when the friend blurts out "he never liked us much, anyway." What happened? As Wayne talks to Arnold on their trek through the forest, we learn that his life is full of lost friends, lost family, lost moments in time. His successful car rental business is but a memory. He had an affair, promised his wife to break it off, then stayed in contact. "I can't remember the last time we swam together," he says of himself and Eileen. But there's hope: in what amounts to a plea for his life, he tells Arnold, "I love my wife... we have two beautiful kids, and I'm just getting to know them." His wife loves him too, it's clear, and the film asks us whether everything Wayne has lost needs to be redeemed. Is his love for his wife the only thing that's supposed to be left after all these years? Is he to weep about everything that's gone or accept it as a fact of life and hold on to Eileen for comfort?

A counterpoint to this is Arnold, played by Willem Dafoe as a desperate man using the last of his inner strength to feign confidence. Details about him are sparse, but we gather that unlike Wayne, he never had much to lose. He lives in "a household of disappointed people" -- his deaf father blares the television all night, his wife yells at him to take out the trash, and neither his career nor his marriage is going anywhere. The question here isn't whether he can make up for the things he has lost but whether he can redeem the fact that he has never had anything to lose, that his life never got out of the starting gate. This, when one thinks about it, is a tremendously sad notion, and an incomparably depressing realization to make. People usually regret things that went wrong, bad choices that have taken them off their preferred path, but what do you do when you discover that you have simply gone nowhere?

As we ponder these issues and others, the film entertains with compelling plot twists, beautiful and crisp cinematography by Denis Lenoir, and a trio of expertly modulated performances, particularly from the great Helen Mirren. The ending, which contains a curious bit of direct repetition, gently answers (or maybe "responds to" is a better term) some of the questions while leaving others poignantly open. Is redemption out of reach for these people? Maybe, but for at least some of them, redemption turns out to be irrelevant.