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I think Nicole Kidman has an inherent brittleness and touch of frost, which she does well to channel into characters like Becca in Rabbit Hole. This is a woman of a particular rage. Her young son, Danny, was killed in an accident - a random, irrevocable, there-can-be-no-one-to-blame accident accident - eight months ago, and Kidman's face is stretched like soft leather over muscles so tight they may snap. Becca has a few choice outbursts in Rabbit Hole, but they are far less interesting than the sensational fury burning beyond those day-blue eyes when she is saying nothing at all.

Becca may or may not be a believer; if she is, she quips, she would say that God is a sensational prick. She dutifully attends group therapy sessions with her husband, Howie (Aaron Eckhart), who is doing it because That's What People Do. He is driven by a genuine, naive hope that such things can also work, and a touch of the desperation of not knowing what else to try.

Both characters, Becca and Howie, are cycling along the tracks of grief in different directions. They both own immeasurable pain but can't incorporate it into their lives, and certainly not into their relationship, where there is nothing else. There is a coterie of supporting characters around the couple - Dianne Wiest is particularly lovely as Becca's mother, who has also lost a son - but this movie still feels like a two-hander, watching the husband and wife reach the crisis point, and eventually break.

The storytelling in Rabbit Hole is almost uniformly trite, all twinkly piano music and flat photography in a grim universe of grief. I am a fan of nearly every performer here, though, and they elevate the material nicely. The only one who can't keep up is Eckhart, who does admittedly deliver one of the best "high" takes I've ever seen, but can't hit the top of his emotional crescendo without growling like a whiny bear. He is unfortunately far outpaced by Kidman, who turns in a performance of such extroardinary focus and depth that one can understand why she also chose to co-produce the picture. A role like this is a thick and juicy steak for an actress of any age, and Kidman's particularly.

You may be wondering about the title. It comes from the film's most interesting character, Jason (Miles Teller), who is the teenage boy who was driving the car that killed young Danny. Jason is about to go to college and is writing and drawing a comic book about parallel worlds - the many-worlds hypothesis commuted into a strategy for dealing with inconsolable loss. He and Becca meet infrequently to have those automatic conversations that one has where one talks about everything besides the point. I think a lot about that kid. He may be the heart of the story, though he's almost never in it.