Available on DVD: “Small Town Murder Songs”

Peter Stormare (left) in Small Town Murder Songs

Ed Gass-Donnelly’s rural crime drama, Small Town Murder Songs, punctures the veneer of bucolic quiet in a mostly Mennonite farming community in Ontario. Beneath a deceptive calm, it uncovers a core of fear and loathing as ominous as the backwoods world of Winter’s Bone.

The protagonist, Walter (Peter Stormare), is a stocky, middle-aged policeman whose violent past has made him a local pariah. An early scene shows his baptism into born-again Christianity, and we listen in on his earnest conversations with a church deacon. But the movie doesn’t pretend that his conversion is more than a desperate defense against eruptive inner demons that continue to hound him.

The film is regularly punctuated with quasi hymns by the Canadian indie rock band Bruce Peninsula that dramatize Walter’s torment. These spare, harshly percussive, folk-gospel numbers shouted by a choir lash out like bursts of fire and brimstone; you feel assaulted by unseen forces of righteousness swinging bundles of sticks.

Religious exhortations in capital letters are flashed as chapter headings. “Repent and profess your faith,” reads one. “If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn and offer him your left,” reads another. The soundtrack and the prophetic warnings evoke the consciousness of a man whose sorry personal history is suggested only in brief flashbacks of him giving a beating.

Walter’s past is also discernible in his studiedly blank face and in his eyes, which flicker with barely contained fury. His inner volatility is only slightly more masked than that of Brent Sexton’s vengeful father of a murdered teenager in the AMC series The Killing. One palliative for Walter is his new girlfriend, Sam (Martha Plimpton), a gentle blond waitress from the local diner who babbles a lot. Religious and flighty, she is the polar opposite of his previous lover, Rita (Jill Hennessy).

Walter’s newfound equilibrium is put to the test when the body of a young woman is found near a lake. It is the town’s first murder in decades. The 911 phone call reporting the discovery is quickly traced to Rita, who lies to the police when questioned and insists that her new lover, Steve (Stephen Eric McIntyre), was with her on the evening of the crime. The investigation quickly reveals that Steve and the victim were both seen that night at a nearby strip club.

That’s all I’ll say about the story, which is not really a whodunit but a character study of a man squeezed in a psychological, spiritual and professional vise. We never learn what happened to Walter’s relationship with Rita, who is as dark and scary as Sam is sweet and garrulous, but it must have been explosive. When Walter visits Rita, her palpable hatred of him leaves you shaken. Steve is a scruffy, shotgun-toting lowlife with a malevolent grin who looks as feral as a backwoodsman out of Deliverance. Push inevitably comes to shove.

Small Town Murder Songs is compellingly acted from top to bottom. As the raw passions of its hard-bitten characters seep into you, the songs hammer them even more deeply into your consciousness. The film’s only flaw — a big one — is its brevity. When it ends after 76 minutes, you are left wishing it had included Walter’s back story and had offered a more detailed picture of the town. A part of me wants Gass-Donnelly to go back and shoot those scenes, then re-release it.