Wendy Carroll (Michelle Williams) hopes to start a new life in Alaska with her dog, Lucy, in Wendy and Lucy. (Simon Max Hill/Oscilloscope/Mongrel Media)

To watch Wendy and Lucy is to experience two different films simultaneously. One is a gossamer, slight story of a girl who loses her dog. Director and co-writer Kelly Reichardt keeps the bones bare, with no dialogue and little music except for Wendy’s plaintive humming. The effect is like peering at a diorama, a study in smallness. But at the same time, Wendy and Lucy is the rare film that sits and stews in your subconscious, growing heavier with import. What felt like a melancholy tinge comes to feel — in the days and weeks after viewing — like dread, or horror. It sticks.

Wendy and Lucy is the rare film that sits and stews in your subconscious, growing heavier with import. What felt like a melancholy tinge comes to feel — in the days and weeks after viewing — like dread, or horror.

Wendy (Michelle Williams) is en route to Alaska, as she tells a group of young drifters she briefly encounters gathered around a bonfire one night. “I hear they might need people,” she says, and as she hovers warily at the darkest edges of the fire, you have the sense she would like to be needed.

Wendy’s push toward a better life is an old, very American quest story, but with a modern bleakness. She is not consciously off the grid — this is no counterculture exercise — but the grid seems indifferent to her. She has no cell phone, no computer; she scrapes together coins for a payphone. As she wanders the streets of an anonymous small town in Oregon, Wendy is more like a Depression-era train-hopper than a fashionable 1960s vagabond by choice; she is not so much dropping out as being forced out. No one would notice if she vanished, and so she does.

Her car breaks down in Oregon, taking a chunk out of her small budget, which she scribbles in childish script in a worn notebook. That book is both optimistic (finally, a place to express herself) and tragically limited (all she records is the dollars-and-cents burden of poverty). This first, unexpected debt sets off a domino effect. Short on cash, Wendy steals dog food and is ratted out by a prissy, unyielding teenage stock boy who has no concept that his actions will have far-reaching effects. While she’s being held at the police station for shoplifting, Wendy loses her dog.

The dog, Lucy, is Wendy’s lifeline; she keeps her owner tapped in to kindness and compassion. Without the dog, the young woman is unmoored. She wanders from place to place in this small town looking for Lucy, her search set against a soundtrack of rolling trains and whistles, or a kind of low, industrial hiss. But Reichardt (Old Joy) is not a romantic, and Wendy and Lucy is not a pretty film. Wendy cleans herself in the dirty gas station bathroom, and tries to sleep in the woods, ducking predators of all kinds. Her efforts to navigate the town lead nowhere. “You can’t get an address without an address, or a job without a job,” she’s told by a mechanic (Will Patton), who’s both smirking and resigned.

Wendy's life unravels when her best friend, her dog Lucy, disappears. (Simon Max Hill/Oscilloscope/Mongrel Media)

We know almost nothing about how Wendy got to this point. When she calls her sister on a payphone, her sister hangs up; not her problem. Perhaps Wendy is a perpetual screw-up, or maybe her sister simply can’t afford a long-distance call. In a way, what brought Wendy to these circumstances doesn’t matter; to dwell in the past is a luxury she doesn’t have. The question is: what will she do now, in the present, in a community but not part of it?

She does find connection, briefly, with a haggard security guard (Wally Dalton) at a big box store who is assigned the task of kicking her out of the parking lot for loitering. (Much of the movie is about Wendy being shooed away, dog-like.) At her most desperate, he slips her some cash, taking a little pride in his altruism. When Wendy peeks down at the bundle of bills, it turns out to be only a few dollars.

Wendy’s Alaskan dream may have something in common with Into the Wild (2007), but she doesn’t possess any of the philosophical bearings that led the hero of that film to the backwoods. She is almost animal, moving by instinct and always on alert, perpetually aware of the perils of being a young woman alone, poor and going nowhere.

The film lags in the middle, snagged by its inherent tedium, but even then, Williams’s stellar performance animates what is, ultimately, more an idea than a story (though it does come from a short story called “Train Choir” by co-screenwriter Jon Raymond). With her cap of dark hair and her bruised, skinny legs jutting boyishly out of her shorts, Williams has wiped away any of her off-screen glamour. Wendy is simply trying to pass for the kind of American who lives in a land of wide-open opportunities, but she is unnoticed. Wendy exists in a kind of penumbral world, and yet it is cruelly, brightly lit; she’s caught in the floodlights of parking lots and the pop of a police camera flashbulb.

All that light, but still, no one sees her. Here, in the depths of an economic disaster, with the ranks of the poor thickening daily, Reichardt’s unforgettable question to us is: why not?

Wendy and Lucy opens in Toronto on Feb. 6 and Vancouver on Feb. 13, with other Canadian cities to follow.

Katrina Onstad is the film columnist for CBCNews.ca.