Kantemir Balagov showed talent in his 2017 debut, Closeness , about a kidnapping in a North Caucasus town, then delivered fully on that promise with his stunning second feature, Beanpole , about two traumatized women in post-WWII Leningrad. Both those films centered on women whose grim worlds were closing in on them — a tomboyish auto mechanic in Closeness ; a nurse and the frontline friend who turns on her in Beanpole . The Russian director’s first film in English, by contrast, is testosterone-driven, a father-son story in which the constricting codes of masculinity lead to senseless loss.

The milieu of a small swathe of New Jersey with a close-knit Circassian community is drawn in sketchy fashion. Balagov originally intended to make the film in his hometown of Nalchik in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains.…