As writer-director Diane Bell's “Of Dust and Bones” languorously unfolded before me, I was reminded of “Twin Peaks” writer-director David Lynch's edict, with the show's controversial third season on Showtime last year, that scenes should be allowed to breathe.

On paper, this is a rigorously spare, minimalist film, centering around three characters, with only three other credited actors even seen onscreen, and a plot that could be summed up on a postcard, but Bell bathes in the atmospheric richness of her California desert setting, shooting her film entirely on location to tremendous effect.

Alex (Michael Piccirilli) is a former colleague of Bryan (David Zaugh), a war correspondent who was killed while reporting from Syria, and as the film opens, Alex is traveling to the remote, isolated home of David's widow, Clio (Gaynor Howe), to ask for David's unpublished correspondence, to use in a documentary Alex is making.

The conflict between Alex and Clio over David's work comes to encompass questions of Alex's culpability in David's death, having sent him to Syria to cover the situation there on the ground, and Clio's retreat from the outside world into a virtually lifeless wilderness where she's methodically constructed a spiraling labyrinth of cairns in lieu of maintaining anything approaching human contact.

Bell evokes this profound sense of solitude with contemplative cinematography that leans heavily on the natural beauty of the California desert and a narrative pacing that makes the term “unhurried” an almost comical understatement.

In a film that's barely more than 90 minutes long, it's 10 minutes before any words are spoken by the actors at all — at five minutes in, we hear some idle radio chatter in the background — and nearly 40 minutes before the lead female character utters her first line of dialogue.

As a viewer, it made me feel at first like an intruder in a cloistered and unfamiliar environment, which is exactly what Alex's experience is, as he struggles to draw Clio out of her silent refusal to interact with him, at which he ultimately succeeds out of sheer persistence.

Clio's grudging acknowledgement of Alex's presence does not necessarily connote her approval for his agenda however, since she cannily observes that, for all of his high-minded societal aims in airing a documentary about David's work, what Alex is really seeking is personal absolution, which she explicitly refuses to give him.

At the same time, Alex accurately calls out Clio for living in a ghost-haunted world of echoes and shadows, where her memories and fantasies of her dead husband and son blend together with the present day to the point that she frequently loses track of herself in the specters of her past and whatever possibilities she once imagined for herself.

I suspect the humanistic flavor of this film's existentialism might have appealed to Albert Camus, whose guiding contention, much like Bell's take on the terrible senselessness of the world's tragedies, was that there is no intrinsic meaning or morality to the fates that befall us, but this merely makes it incumbent upon us to infuse our existence with our own chosen values.