THE Drop, a taut, atmospheric, exceedingly well-written thriller adapted by Dennis Lehane from one of his short stories, commits one of the most egregious sins in fiction, introducing an adorable puppy early in the proceedings, only to trot it out at regular intervals to stoke the audience’s growing sense of impending doom. “That’s a good-looking dog,” goes a running line in the film. Its usual predicate — “it would be a shame if anything happened to it” — remains queasily implicit.

It’s a credit to Lehane’s screenplay, director Michael R. Roskam’s restraint and a superb cast led by the masterful Tom Hardy that The Drop earns every sad-eyed glance and heart-tugging whimper. Lehane — best known to moviegoers as the author of the Boston-set Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone — here brings his acute eye to Brooklyn, where he displays his usual command of local vernacular and tribal rituals, as well as unsentimental moral inquiry. “I felt bad about it,” says one character about committing a particularly heinous crime. “Does that count?”

As Hardy’s character, a bartender named Bob Saginowski, explains in the film’s introduction, there are corners of his neighbourhood “that no one ever thinks about”. He occupies one such corner, a tavern owned by his Cousin Marv (James Gandolfini in a fitting final role). Known as a “drop bar”, the neighbourhood hangout is used by the local crime syndicate to transfer its cash in a seemingly endless loop of well-thumbed ill-gotten gains.

Bob, meanwhile, keeps his head down, buying rounds for his regulars while Marv scowls in the background — at one point he orders Bob to take down the Christmas decorations because it’s Dec 27. But Bob’s watchful solitude is punctured one night when he encounters that irresistible little pit bull. With the help of a pretty neighbour named Nadia (Noomi Rapace), Bob begins to care for the dog, simultaneously becoming involved in a years-old crime investigation and perhaps running afoul of the Chechen gang with whom Cousin Marv has become entangled.

As he did so brilliantly in the one-man thriller Locke earlier this year, Hardy earns instant sympathy from the audience as a man who seems always to be two steps behind — until he displays startling acumen at the most unlikely (and startlingly grisly) moments. He moves through the wintry cityscape with a downcast, wary sense of foreboding: the viewer can feel him try to disappear as more people turn to him, either as savior, scapegoat or something entirely different.

Like the Boston neighborhoods of Lehane’s best known novels, the Brooklyn of The Drop is a tightly self-contained place, its denizens barely aware of the wider world. One of the film’s many thoughtful subtexts has to do with the wages of insularity and a fatal loss of self-respect and identity, as characters either resort to brute violence or retreat into their childhood homes in order to protect themselves. The Drop is so convincingly conceived, so detailed and acutely observed, that each of those houses — including the one Cousin Marv shares with his sister, played by Ann Dowd — could be the setting for its own movie.

“Don’t forget to eat,” Marv’s sister calls out before leaving the house. That’s a common motif too: when a shadowy figure played by Matthias Schoenaerts tells Bob not to forget to feed the dog, it comes across less as a suggestion than a terrifying threat. As The Drop reaches its tense climax at the bar on Super Bowl Sunday, the sense of unease is palpable — but it’s also become obvious that Bob can handle his corner of the world not just through cultivating anonymity but by any other means necessary. By that time, there’s no question that we want Bob to triumph, along with his new pet — which, it’s true, really is a good-looking dog.

—By arrangement with The Washington Post

Published in Dawn, September 13th, 2014