Starring Richard Jenkins and Haaz Sleiman. Rated PG. Opens Friday, April 25, at the Fifth Avenue Cinemas

The Visitor is a film of many small pleasures that add up to some larger epiphanies about our sheltered lives and the need to escape them at crucial times.

The main character here, a tenured economics professor named Walter Vale, is more living in a shell than sheltered. He is played by Richard Jenkins, best known as the ghostly father on Six Feet Under and an actor of infinitely subtle resources. Walter has been phoning in his work since the death of his concert-pianist wife—an event that remains undiscussed in the fat-free script from director Thomas McCarthy (who previously made The Station Agent) but which hangs over him like a shroud.

Forced to leave suburban Connecticut to deliver a paper at NYU, he returns to the Greenwich Village apartment presumably left over from a richer time in his life. There he encounters not memories but something unexpected: a handsome young Syrian man (Haaz Sleiman) and his Senegalese girlfriend (Danai Jekesai Gurira), have been living there for months, thanks to some scam in the building.

They pack immediately, but something about their plight penetrates Walter’s veil of self-absorption, and he asks them to stay. The arrangement is supposed to be temporary, but the professor is increasingly affected by the outgoing nature of the man, called Tarek, and the more mysterious qualities of the woman, Zainab. Some viewers may find Tarek unnaturally friendly, but this goes with the territory for an itinerant musician who finds that his drum (and good humour) can fit into almost every situation. Indeed, only someone this engaging could pull Walter so far out of his comfort zone—particularly as this frustrated pianist harbours a secret attraction to the djembe and African music in general.

Things take a harder turn when the Syrian gets in legal trouble, summoning Tarek’s beautiful mother (Satin Rouge’s Israeli-born Hiam Abbass) and challenging Walter to reexamine more hidden areas of his personality. Just who is travelling and who belongs are left open in The Visitor, and these questions will be thought about, carefully, long after leaving the theatre.