Guillermo Arriaga wrote Amores Perros, 21 Grams and Babel with Mexican director Alejandro Inárritu, and his first feature as sole writer/director retains the tricky structure of those films.

Three plot strands, seemingly disparate, coalesce in the end but not before you wonder how on earth Arriaga is going to manage it.

In the first story, the excellent Charlize Theron plays Sylvia, who manages a smart seaview restaurant in Oregon, sleeps with almost everyone in sight and hates herself for it. We don’t know why, except that she obviously feels guilty about something.

In the second, two families go to the funeral of a Mexican immigrant (Joaquim de Almeida). He had been having a passionate affair with an American woman (Kim Basinger) and apparently the isolated trailer in which they had their liaison burnt down with them inside. Then her daughter, Mariana (Jennifer Lawrence), and his son, Santiago (JD Pardo), meet in secret to try to find out what happened to their parents.

A third strand has a Mexican girl (Tessa la) watching her crop-duster father (Danny Pino) crash his aeroplane in a sorghum field. He is badly injured and sends her off to the States on a strange but interconnected mission.

All this is accomplished with some fine film-making, acting that is well above average and a screenplay which gradually begins to make sense. Theron is particularly impressive and Lawrence and Basinger aren’t far behind. 

It’s a dramatic and sometimes melodramatic story, full of a raw kind of truth about families and tragedy, and Robert Elswit’s cinematography eloquently paints the desert of New Mexico while John Toll does the same for Oregon.

One thing’s for sure: Arriaga can direct at least as impressively as Inárritu and use his actors with the same sensitivity.