She's a loner who lives a life of willed deprivation. She does not speak or socialize in any way with her colleagues at the plastics factory where she works, off in some bleak corner of Britain. She also seems to suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder. She does not use the same bar of soap twice, and she only eats fried chicken with rice and apples. Hanna appears to be an island unto herself, though there is some quality about her that leads us to believe she wasn't always so estranged from the world.

Spanish director Isabel Coixet's beautifully quiet and measured film (which was shot in English) is concerned with the world, which continually makes a determined refusal to face the past and reality, however painful. Hanna's accent betrays her as not being British, though it is hard to place where exactly she's from. But wherever it was, the young woman obviously suffered something grievous.

Forced by her employers to take a holiday, which she's failed to do for four years, Hanna (Sarah Polley) finds herself in a frayed British seaside town of slate-gray skies, frumpish B&Bs and cheerless caffs. From one of the town's prospects overlooking the sea, she sees a distant oil rig on fire. Soon, this burning man-made island in the frigid North Sea will become Hanna's home for the next month.

Overhearing a man in a pub complaining about not being able to find a nurse for an injured man on the rig, Hanna approaches him and declares that she is a nurse. Is she telling the truth? If she is a trained nurse, why has she been reduced to a factory drudge at a plastics plant? The man is desperate, and so Hanna is immediately hired and sent out to the rig. There she's put in charge of Joseph (Tim Robbins), a man who has suffered some serious burns in the fire that claimed the life of another man.

The skeleton crew that's left is to a man, like Hanna, solitary figures of no fixed abode. There's the South American cook, Simon (Javier Cámara), who labors over the meals he prepares for the crew like a four-star chef, though his feasts are seldom appreciated. Then there's the world-weary captain of the rig, Dimitri, a sad-eyed philosopher who admits to feeling lost on land. There's also a young oceanographer, Martin (Daniel Mays), who worries over the state of the fish and the mollusks that try to survive in a warming sea. This oil rig, then, is a quiet shipwreck of a world off a noisy, ruined coast.

The film's primary focus is the relationship that develops between Hanna and Joseph. Temporarily blinded by the fire, Joseph attempts to draw the taciturn Hanna out in conversation, even as he suffers the excruciating pain of having the bandages stripped from his seared, exposed flesh. There is a mystery at Joseph's core as well, and as these two scarred and scared souls begin to divulge more of their story, we begin to appreciate how their wounds were won.

Two words, one from each, tie up the various threads of this haunting film. There is also an unseen narrator, who leads us to realize that Hanna was once forced to make a choice as horrible as the one William Styron's Sophie had to make.

The cast is excellent, though it is the central performances of Robbins and Polley that stand out. Though primarily confined to a gurney, Robbins' playful voice and searching, dead eyes camouflage the layers of agony, both physical and spiritual, that his character contains. Polley expertly cracks the hardened veneer of her character Hanna gradually. Seldom has a mere wisp of a smile seemed so powerful.