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There is no drifting through Steve McQueen’s exhibition for a cursory, half-distracted gawk — visitors book a timed slot for Giardini, his 30-minute film, which takes the biennale gardens as his subject.

He insists that his films are “first and foremost about looking”. You are a participant, not a couch potato. He won’t let you get away with anything less.

Expectations run high but that is hardly surprising. It’s not only the quiet cinema atmosphere that creates them. McQueen has built up a solid reputation. He was not only the 1999 Turner Prize winner but made the acclaimed film Hunger last year that was awarded the Caméra d’Or at Cannes.

With the Giardini as a subject he is on fertile historic ground. This leafy park, first laid out by the decree of a conquering Napoleon, has the feel of an upmarket housing estate. A host of nations — but first and most prominently the leading colonial powers — have been invited to build their own quirkily distinctive and often boastfully grandiose pavilions. It is as if the age of empire has arrived on Wisteria Lane. And colonialism is an area that McQueen, a deeply politicised artist of Afro-Caribbean ancestry, has repeatedly addressed.

But don’t expect a rant. If McQueen feels anger, he restrains it with an almost ferocious self-control. Occasionally you can imagine his white-knuckle grip on the camera. The easy catharsis of overspilling emotion is denied as he focuses on the formal elements of film-making — on framing and viewpoints, on lighting and speed — so that the spectator can start to do the feeling instead.

Giardini is a rigorously understated piece that shows us the gardens in winter. This strange hangover of a lost era of empire, currently heaving with excitable visitors, is abandoned to rubbish and builders’ detritus, to a pair of gay lovers and a pottering bag lady. The viewer gazes, sometimes in tight close-up, sometimes down long dripping vistas, at a desolate world of bare branches and burrowing beetles, boarded-up doorways and a pair of prowlers. A soundtrack of hammering raindrops and church bells, of birds singing and crowds chanting, builds up and then dies away periodically into a silence so thick that you almost suffocate. Black dogs scavenge, like a ghostly depression, around the scene.

That is pretty much it as far as anything actually happening goes. But the atmosphere is loaded. As dark and light, night and day, art and nature, sacred and mundane meet, the viewer feels the tension mount.

Violence threatens like the roar of an approaching waterfall but the spectator is never swept as far as its edge. As images are juxtaposed, or overlaid one upon the other in memory, meanings and possibilities gather like the droplet of water that gathers at the end of a twig. We watch it swelling and wait for it to drop. Will it?

Nothing is immediate or obvious with the work of McQueen. He might have won the Turner Prize ten years ago but it was Tracey Emin with her notorious “unmade bed” that got everyone talking. Now, McQueen follows in Emin’s wake again. When she represented Britain at the last biennale the pavilion was disturbed with lots of noisy opinion. This year visitors filed out of McQueen’s cinema as silently as they had walked in.

This show is not about saying, it is about thinking. And it will probably only be a long time later that, like that swelling bead of water at the end of a twig, the proverbial penny finally drops. A shadow will be cast over the garden when it does.

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