The Argentina of Lisandro Alonso's new film Liverpool is one wholly unrecognizable to the Argentina of, say, Lucrecia Martel's The Headless Woman. Blanketed in crisp snow, Alonso's Tierra La Fuego begins as a small town of tacky restaurants and lonely strip clubs but soon transports us past the markers to a settlement with only one canteen amongst a few cabins in a sparse opening in the wilderness. If anyone's voice registered above a whimper, it might be prime real estate for a second Jonestown.

Yet, by evidence of protagonist Farrel (Juan Fernández), people do leave the small township and go about their own lives eventually, though it would seem they hardly find the connections and adventures they seek. Making his living on a large cargo ship, Farrel asks his boss if it would be okay to take leave for three days while at the port of Ushuaia to visit his ailing mother, who might already be dead. Featuring no more than ten lines of dialogue, it's the talkiest that Alonso's film, which he co-wrote with Salvador Roselli, ever gets.

But those who are familiar with Alonso's past films will find little surprise in the general absence of dialectics and the strictness of his formalism. Like the ex-con at the center of his 2004 film Los Muertos, Farrel's journey is a return to a place of shame and guilt. After staying in the port of Del Fuego for a night, he arrives at the small settlement where his ailing mother lives with a man who could be his father or an older brother and a young girl (Giselle Irrazabal) who might be Farrel's abandoned daughter. Nobody says anything of consequence and Farrel departs for his ship the morning after, leaving the simple-minded girl nothing but some money and a tacky souvenir keychain.

The keychain, a deceptively useless item that reveals the film's title, is toyed with in the final shot of the film but it provides the film's thematic arc and emotional premise from its first appearance. Farrel returns to the settlement hoping to find a connection to family that he couldn't find out at sea, only to realize that he misses the pleasant isolation that life at sea affords. In the film's first shot, after a blaze of surf guitar oddly plays over the opening credits, two coworkers joyfully play a video game rather than communicate with Farrel, who is watching in the background. For Alonso's characters, there's a fundamental inability to form intimacy with anyone in the world.

This impotence also calls attention to Alonso's weaknesses as a director. The Buenos Aires-born filmmaker has a preternatural instinct for landscapes and often he composes staggering moments of beauty in the desolate tundra, an obsession in his form nearly fetishized by the painted woodland in an Ushuaia restaurant. But like Farrel, he is unable to connect to any of these characters and, more than in any of his past work, Liverpool comes off as indecisive as to whether it actually cares about the deep wells of loneliness and isolation it hints at or if Alonso is simply a James Benning wannabe. This adherence to form and rejection of narrative ambition makes the film more of an exercise in craft than the fully formed work of which Alonso is clearly capable (Los Muertos). But, like the young girl with her keychain, he seems to be content just to fiddle around for now.