This is a difficult film to review without plot spoilers; if you don't want to know about the story's first major twist (which happens less than a third of the way through), then stop reading now. "In the Bedroom" is adapted (by Field and co-writer Rob Festinger) from a short story by the late André Dubus, who was both a moral philosopher, in a vein unfamiliar to American literature since the days of Hawthorne and Melville, and an astute observer of the role of class in shaping human destiny. Field knew Dubus well and began to plan his film with the author's blessing before he died two years ago; perhaps he thought that the title of Dubus' grim little fable, "Killings," was too forbidding for movie audiences (and indeed gave too much away).

Much of the slackness in Field's filmmaking -- which, to be fair, many viewers will tolerate better than I did -- evaporates with a short, sharp shock. Richard, who up until now has seemed like a hapless but well-intentioned deadbeat with a bad Billy Idol dye job, flies off the rails, beats up Natalie and trashes her house. Frank, who's been screwing up his courage to break up with Natalie at his mother's insistence, rushes over to protect her. Richard comes back with a gun, and the ensuing scene has the terrible, weightless quality of real-life tragedy: Natalie scrambles her panicked kids into their bedroom, a shot is fired as she rushes downstairs, she dives to the kitchen floor, screaming and crying. We don't need to know more.

So yes, "In the Bedroom" is partly an issue drama about a middle-aged couple who have to face every parent's worst nightmare, but it also has a trickier agenda. It captures Dubus' fascination with the nature of justice, and in fact with its impossibility. It's also a study of how amazingly painful life can become when its ordinariness, its tiny, protective hypocrisies, are stripped away. Matt goes back to his medical practice and Ruth to her Balkan chorale, but none of it is tolerable. Religion and literature provide no consolation.

When the explosion between this pathologically polite couple finally comes, its dialogue (like so much of this script) feels overcooked, but its emotion is necessary and plangently real; they have lived through their son for years, and now hate themselves and each other for it.

When Ruth goes to the local market, she risks running into Richard, who is out on bail and may face nothing worse than a five-year manslaughter sentence. Their old friends Willis and Katie (more fine veteran acting from William Wise and Celia Weston) chatter on blithely about their innumerable grandchildren, before realizing that Ruth and Matt don't have any and never will. There is nary a note of mockery or satire to "In the Bedroom," but it captures Dubus' conviction that our contemporary clichés about healing are empty: When Matt tracks down Natalie at her convenience-store job, they realize they have nothing to say to each other.

More things happen that I'm not going to tell you about, and we take two long journeys to Willis' house in the deep woods of central Maine, one of them in the depths of night, that seem increasingly psychological or symbolic in nature. With his gradual, lead-footed trudge, his touch that is sometimes delicate and sometimes alarmingly awkward, Field ratchets the tension up to a nearly intolerable level. For all my misgivings, I doubt I'll ever forget the startling climax of "In the Bedroom," or its haunting final image: Matt lying stone-faced in bed, half naked, with cigarette smoke rising from his chest, looking as if his heart were on fire.

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