Kazuki Kitamura and Ayako Fujitani (Nicole Rosario/Eleven Arts)

This week I’ve watched two movies that begin with someone hit by a car on a dark highway, and they’re both good. I wrote briefly about the Korean crime drama A Hard Day in my preview of this year’s Filmfest DC. The second accident happens in an under-the-radar commercial opening from our own shores.

The neo-noir Man from Reno opens with a black screen and the sound of the road; its first image is of windshield wipers crossing wet glass. The gesture quietly announces a mystery that tries to wipe away the fog that obscures its complicated plot.

Paul Del Moral (Pepe Sema) is the sheriff of a small town south of San Francisco, He’s driving on a dark foggy night when he passes a car abandoned on the side of the road; a short drive later, he hits and seemingly kills its driver, but the man runs off. The sequence is gorgeously shot by Richard Wong, with headlights and a flashlight piercing the fog in search of something to hold on to.

After the credits, we meet Aki (Ayako Fujitani), a Japanese mystery writer going into hiding at a San Francisco hotel after being overwhelmed by a recent book tour. She meets a handsome stranger (Kazuki Kitamura) in the hotel bar, and he stays with her for a short time and then disappears, leaving behind a suitcase that for some reason holds a head of lettuce.

The lives of the mystery writer, the sheriff and the stranger intertwine in this atmospheric film. Director Dave Boyle spent part of his teen years doing Mormon missionary work in Australia and fell in with a community of Japanese surf bums (and a few Japanese Mormons). Boyle has since become an unofficial Asian-American director, specializing in features like White on Rice (2009) that deal with that community’s themes. What this outsider brings to the community is a sense of displacement. Aki is clearly far from home, and Fujitani carries the film—you’d never guess she was Steven Seagal’s daughter—conveying a feeling of rootlessness and vulnerability with a quiet strength.

The old-timer sheriff also has an air of being out of place or at least out of time. Sema is a prolific character actor perhaps best known from Brian DePalma’s Scarface, and he’s cast in the kind of role that a Hollywood movie might have given to Harrison Ford. But Sema is an inspired choice, his wizened demeanor suggesting what might have happened to Jimmy Stewart’s character in Vertigo after decades of shrinking and aging. The film resonates with Vertigo in other ways—Aki checks into a hotel not far from where Kim Novak’s character stayed and, like Hitchcock’s film, the script plays off a dreamlike sense of shifting identity.

Another director would camp this material up like a poor man’s Tarantino (see Kill me Three Times—or rather, don’t). The mood here is slightly Lynchian but not nearly so self-conscious. Man from Reno is a convoluted mystery in which the helmsman cares about his characters and doesn’t treat them like pieces of meat or pawns on a chessboard. It doesn’t entirely resolve, but the journey is worth taking.

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Man from Reno
Directed by Dave Boyle
Written by Dave Boyle, Joel Clark, and Michael Lerman.
With Ayako Fujitani, Pepe Serna, Kazuki Kitamura
Not rated: contains violence and sexual situations including light spooning.
Running time 111 minutes
Opens today at Angelika Pop-Up