Not sure that everyone who admired The Return will like Andrey Zvyagintsev's lengthy and complicated second feature. But if he has bitten off a little more than we can chew, The Banishment still remains a powerfully atmospheric piece of cinema.

One of the reasons for its hold is the extraordinary work of cinematographer Mikhail Krichman, who illustrates this free, and much darker, adaptation of a story by William Saroyan called The Laughing Matter with some superb tonal lighting.

The first image has the camera curving around a solitary tree standing against the sky, and there are other moments just as memorable. The use of a sparing score by Andrey Dergachev, using Russian Orthodox chants and the music of Arvo Pärt, is another pleasure.

A third is the acting, especially of Alexander Baluev, who won the Best Actor award at Cannes in 2007. He plays Mark, who is first seen driving from the rural provinces to the city in an unspecified country that may or may not be Russia. He stops at his brother's home in town to have a bullet removed from his arm. We are not told why but assume he is probably on the wrong side of the law.

Later, he takes his wife, Vera (Maria Bonnevie), and his two children (Maxim Shibeav and Katya Kulkina) back to his father's old home in the country, where Vera announces she is pregnant and that the child is not his.

She complains that they are strangers to each other, which caused her to be unfaithful.

Telephoning his brother, Alex ( Konstantin Lavronenko), he is told that either he can kill or forgive her. In the end he does neither, but gets his brother to arrange an abortion while the children spend the night in a friend's house.

The film is clearly indebted to Tarkovsky and full of religious symbolism. There is, for instance, a recitation from Corinthians about love ("It does not insist on its own way") and a bookmark depicting Masaccio's Expulsion from the Garden of Eden.

Zvyagintsev leaves a number of questions in limbo, as if we should answer them ourselves.

No one could say that his sophomore effort about love and possible redemption is as dramatically successful as his debut. But The Banishment is so obviously the work of an exceptional film-maker that you can't deny its power, ambition and ability to keep you watching.