There are times during The Low Down, an endearingly peculiar slice-of-life about north Londoners in their late 20s, when the distracted camera will leave a conversation just to prowl around a person's face, searching for an odd glance or a compulsive twitch of the nose. These minute details, like so many other collected moments in the film, seem insignificant and possibly vacant at first, since so few lead to any sort of conventional dramatic payoff. Even the points at which director Jamie Thraves chooses to enter and exit his characters' lives seem close to arbitrary, leaving their contradictions and ambiguities rolled up in a messy bundle. Though superficially tricked-up with the attitude and flash of the French New Wave—recalling Truffaut's Jules And Jim and Godard's Masculine-Feminine in particular—The Low Down strives for nothing more or less than a brief snapshot, with personal histories implied and futures uncertain. Within these narrow confines, Thraves and his excellent cast give the relaxed impression of life as it's being lived, but, more importantly, they fully inhabit characters that are worth all the improbable attention they receive. Few films would bother with a gloomy malcontent like the one played by Aiden Gillen, whose charms ooze through unattractive layers of ill-tempered narcissism. Along with quarreling friends Dean Lennox Kelly and Tobias Menzies, Gillen runs a reasonably successful prop-shop for TV game shows, and appears ready to advance to the next stage in his life. To that end, he takes steps to move out of his shabby rental space and buy a flat of his own, but instead falls into a casual affair with realtor Kate Ashfield, whose warmth and openness make them an odd match. With his nimble fly-on-the-wall technique, Thraves likes to drop in on scenes where nothing much is at stake, simply observing the telltale signs of human behavior. He suggests the lovers' uncertainty around each other by focusing on the long stretches of idle time they spend together. Unable to fill the air with meaningful talk, they kick around a soccer ball, or practice flipping cigarettes into their mouths—anything to hide their discomfort and back away from real intimacy. If The Low Down feels slight, it's most likely by design, because Thraves is more interested in the languorous spaces between the dramatic incidents that normally tie movies together. Not much happens in terms of story, but however trivial it seems at times, there's plenty to savor in the minutiae.