Movie Review

???

DHEEPAN

Directed by Jacques Audiard. Written by Audiard, Thomas Bidegain, and Noé Debreé. Starring Jesuthasan Antonythasan, Kalieaswari Srinivasan, Claudine Vinasithamby. Kendall Square. 114 minutes. R (violence, language, brief sexuality/nudity). In Tamil and French, with subtitles.

A Jacques Audiard movie looks deceptively naturalistic, but it’s as tightly coiled as a thriller and it hides allegories. Despite a controversial left-hand turn in the final moments, “Dheepan’’ is no exception.

A drama about Sri Lankan émigrés in the gang-ridden apartment complexes outside Paris, the film — winner of the Palme d’Or at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival — moves with the quiet, steely grace of Audiard’s best-known work, “A Prophet’’ (2009). That film tracked a naive young man as he entered prison and hardened into a kingpin. “Dheepan’’ reverses the process, following a warrior and his family as they work to recover their humanity.

One of the film’s messages, actually, is that families can be provisional, made up of strangers who learn to love by propping each other up. “Dheepan’’ opens with a burly, hollow-eyed Sri Lankan freedom fighter (Jesuthasan Antonythasan) — a Tamil Tiger — walking away in exhaustion from his fight against government troops. Wandering into a refugee camp, he connects with a young woman (Kalieaswari Srinivasan), who finds an orphaned 9-year-old girl (Claudine Vinasithamby). Taking the identities of a family killed in the conflict, they present themselves as father Dheepan, mother Yalini, and daughter Illayaal and so win the right to emigrate to France.

How do three randomly matched individuals become an emotional unit? Slowly and with steps forward and backward. Illayaal is the most open-hearted and quickest to adjust; she speaks a little French and is put in a local school. Yalini is selfish and self-absorbed, either out of necessity or because that’s her character; the shock on her face when her “daughter’’ lectures her on maternal kindness is one of the movie’s emotional pivots.

Dheepan, or the living ghost who goes by that name, gets a job as a janitor in a high-rise slum — a banlieue— that doubles as a war zone for rival drug gangs. Because he keeps his head down, respects the turf lines, and is handy with machinery, he gains respect from the thugs, and one of the most striking aspects of “Dheepan’’ — as with “A Prophet’’ — is the ease with which Audiard humanizes characters most movies treat as two-dimensional villains.

Yalini gets a job caring for an ailing man (Faouzi Bensaidi) whose apartment is used as the gang’s front office, and her growing relationship with Brahim (Vincent Rottiers), a sort of criminal mid-level manager, becomes the most oddly touching thread in the film’s tapestry. The family has left one civil war to land in another; with muted yet riveting force, “Dheepan’’ makes the point that business and bloodletting are just two sides of the world’s coin for people at the bottom.

The movie isn’t out to make a statement about the current refugee crisis so much as show the disorientation of strangers in a strange land; the leads — Srinivasan is a theater actress in Chennai and Antonythasan a Sri Lankan actor and author who fought with the Tamil Tigers in his youth — make specific people of their characters rather than metaphors. The way Dheepan and his “wife’’ grow together feels privileged and honest.

Audiard is ultimately more stylist than realist, though, and at a certain point Dheepan’s war-time traumas come back with a vengeance. “Dheepan’’ pulls its poverty-stricken characters together only to atomize the community in a bloody climax that’s cinematic as hell yet dramatically unconvincing, as though a finely observed fable had decided to go out with a “Taxi Driver’’ bang. A final, dreamlike image of hope muddies the waters further.

The last scenes feel like a concession to the notion that movies have to have endings, and they unquestionably make an impression. But the quiet strength of “Dheepan’’ is how it shows these lives — the people in our midst we never see — rolling on forever, adapting, struggling, and finding their way.

???

DHEEPAN

Directed by Jacques Audiard. Written by Audiard, Thomas Bidegain, and Noé Debreé. Starring Jesuthasan Antonythasan, Kalieaswari Srinivasan, Claudine Vinasithamby. Kendall Square. 114 minutes. R (violence, language, brief sexuality/nudity). In Tamil and French, with subtitles.

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @tyburr.