It's an admittedly unorthodox complaint to make of a film, but Sebastián Lelio's adaptation of Naomi Alderman's novel “Disobedience” takes such care to render its characters and their culture clash with such respect that its resolution almost seems bereft of any opinion of its own.

British-born Jewish actress Rachel Weisz clearly found her passion play when she chose to co-produce this film adaptation, in which she plays Ronit Krushka, a British-born Jewish photographer who's called home to the Orthodox Jewish community of London by the death of her father, an elderly rabbi of great esteem.

The greatest strength of the narrative is how organically it all unfolds, since even characters such as Ronit, who have spent years away from the community, are still family who grew up among these people.

As much as Lelio believes that subtext is for cowards, by opening and closing the film with heartfelt speeches by rabbis about how humans are set apart from both the angels and the animals by our free will and ability to make moral choices of our own, he settles us into the rhythms of this close-knit community with conversations that can't help but feel familiar to any family, regardless of religion.

Ronit was the ambitious one who moved to New York City to make her mark, and yet, in spite of her successful career, the few glimpses we see of her life before she returns to London don't seem very fulfilling.

By contrast, her childhood friends Esti (Rachel McAdams) and Dovid Kuperman (Alessandro Nivola) are genuinely engaged by their work in educating the bright Jewish youths of their community, and seem at first to be content in their marriage to one another, until Ronit's unexpected return.

While we see how Dovid has stepped up to become the son that Ronit's father never had — the elder rabbi's obituary states he died childless, and he left his house and all its contents to the synagogue, much to his daughter's chagrin — it doesn't take long to figure out that Esti is unfulfilled, because she's never been sexually attracted to any man, and has never had any lovers other than Dovid and, during their younger years, Ronit.

Aside from a brief but extremely explicit covert liaison between Esti and Ronit, this is a film whose emotional shades of expression are as deliberately limited as the black, gray, brown and blue palette of its wardrobe and cinematography.

A single kiss, witnessed after dark in a relatively secluded public place, becomes a hushed scandal, and the one reflex that all the characters seem to share in common, as their preferred course of action, is to withdraw from involvements that threaten to become too heated.

The film's approach to the Orthodox Jewish community couldn't help but remind me of Peter Weir's “Witness,” in which Harrison Ford temporarily settled among the Amish, since both portrayals treated their respective religions as valid choices for those who chose them.

And I suppose one could argue that Ronit and Esti, like Ford's big city cop and Kelly McGillis' Amish widow in “Witness,” are simply too much inhabitants of their respective cultures to make an entirely new life for themselves, either in New York or London.

And yet, it felt to me like each woman was ultimately settling for half of a life, either materially well-off and feeling empty inside, or else part of a supportive community, but unable to express her full, true identity.

If nothing else, between the pillars of Weisz, McAdams and Nivola, it's impeccably well-acted, and one of its few laughs comes from a deliberately on-the-nose use of The Cure's “Lovesong.”