Like John Wayne’s Green Berets or Jean-Luc Godard’s Les Carabiniers, The Visitor wears its politics on its sleeve. On paper it’s limply liberal and strangely schematic. It features a widowed geopolitics expert, Walter (Richard Jenkins), who is transformed and purified by his unlikely friendship with a free-spirited illegal immigrant called Tarek (Haaz Sleiman).

Tarek is squatting in Walter’s rarely-visited Manhattan apartment, and is rumbled only when Walter, still wallowing in bereavement, drifts up to the city to attend an academic conference on global economics. After a brief confrontation, the two men become fast friends. Tarek teaches Walter the African drums, and the two men learn to appreciate the true power of multiculturalism in action.

Nasty Homeland Security agents, however, have other ideas, and Tarek is arrested and imprisoned in a Queens detention centre, leaving Walter alone in Mahattan with only Tarek’s surprisingly va-va-voom and handily widowed mother Mouna (Hiam Abbass) for company. A couple of awkward conversations and a trip to The Phantom of the Opera later, and Walter and Mouna are making googly eyes at each other across the cultural divide.

Somehow the writer-director Thomas McCarthy (The Station Agent) and a near pitch-perfect cast manage to elevate the material above the contrivances, and give the drama some real emotional ballast. Jenkins in particular, familiar mostly as the undead pop from Six Feet Under, gives a power-house turn. A key scene in Central Park, where he is invited to join Tarek’s drumming group, is mesmerising for how he simultaneously conveys awkwardness, embarrassment, and the dim flickering of childish innocence.

15, 108 minutes

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