Stephanie Daley (R, 2007)

STEPHANIE DALEY is writer-director Hilary Brougher's complex, nuanced, and ultimately affecting film about infanticide. The sobering drama focuses on Stephanie (Amber Tamblyn), a 16-year-old raised in a Christian home who gains notoriety as the "ski mom" after she prematurely gives birth to -- and supposedly murders -- a baby girl while on a school ski trip. Right before she collapses on the dull-white snow, she leaves a blood-caked trail of footprints. Lydie Crane (Tilda Swinton, who also executive produced the film) is the forensics psychologist hired to determine exactly what took place that fateful day. Twenty-six weeks pregnant and still recovering from a prior stillbirth, Lydie is confident that she won't let her recent loss obscure her professional distance. But preventing her personal life from converging with her work has become tough for the psychologist; as she excavates Stephanie's past, Lydie's precariously balanced present threatens to capsize.

Swinton tackles her role with a very effective light touch, giving it that much more heft. But it's Tamblyn who impresses. A TV actress who's made the occasional foray into film, she infuses a difficult, potentially alienating role with heartbreaking grace. In the hands of someone less skilled, Stephanie could have been a screeching cautionary tale. But here, she's at once abominable and humane, both guilty and innocent. When an older boy manipulates her into having sex and she later gives birth to the baby produced by that shockingly cold act, her anguish is tangible. And profoundly moving.

In STEPHANIE DALEY, Brougher has fashioned an intelligent movie that easily could have been mined simply for its shock value. She's refreshingly unafraid of ambiguity. But the film's potency is diluted by one too many portentous moments: the depressingly dark rooms, the dripping blood (not just from the birth scene), a classroom discussion of The Scarlet Letter, a deer caught literally in the headlights. Also, her superficial attempts to examine the role religion plays in the tragedy confuse rather than enhance the film. Still, a movie that tackles a lightning-rod subject without judgment and with deep compassion is a rarity to be savored.