A man steers a fishing vessel through grey-blue seas off the coast of wintry Massachusetts, while another man chats with a young boy in a life jacket. The camera keeps its distance, the three figures aboard the boat framed by a wide horizon, but we soon perceive that the boy is son to the man at the boat’s helm, and nephew to the other man. ‘If you could take one guy to an island with you,’ the uncle asks his nephew, ‘if it was between me and your father, who would you take?’ An almost aggressive need – pick me, pick me – runs like a current beneath the question, and of course, the boy chooses his father.

Manchester by the Sea is the third feature from American screenwriter–director Kenneth Lonergan, also a playwright, and it is a scrupulous drama of familial intimacy and loss. The uncle is Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck), and between these early, outdoor scenes and others where we watch him taciturnly unblock toilets and fix taps inside a series of cramped apartments – he’s a janitor, in Boston – we perceive not only that years have passed but that something has gone wrong, something has severed him from love. There is a remoteness in Lee’s eyes that’s like a lid clamped over a seething pain; his jaw and shoulders are set rigid. Sometimes he punches men who annoy him at the bar where he huddles after work. That seems to be his only way of touching anyone.