Jeff Nichols’s feature debut is a brooding, laconic drama that concerns three unnamed brothers whose drunkard father abandoned them and their embittered mother years ago. After subsequently sobering up, he discovers religion and starts a second family that the trio awkwardly meets for the first time at his funeral. The film recalls the work of coproducer David Gordon Green (George Washington, Undertow) in its use of desolate jerkwater locales and its meandering, unhurried pace. But here there’s also an undercurrent of biblical revenge that lends the narrative a sense of violent menace and an almost continuous tension. At the center of the film is a keenly understated performance by Michael Shannon (Bug, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead) as the eldest of the cast-off sons. With Douglas Ligon and Barlow Jacobs.