THE DROP. Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2014. Tom Hardy, Noomi Rapace, James Gandolfini, Matthias Schoenaerts, John Ortiz, Elizabeth Rodriguez, Michael Aronov. Based on the 2009 short story “Animal Rescue” by Dennis Lehane, who later expanded it into a novel titled The Drop (2014). Director: Michaël R. Roskam.

   It may be somewhat odd to begin a movie review with a brief allusion to the movie’s ending. But there’s a line spoken by one of the secondary characters at the tail end of The Drop that basically sums up the whole film. I’m not going to tell you who it is, of course, or what he says. Trust me when I tell you that it’s one of those lines, so rare in commercial cinema today, that makes you sit up and take notice.

   How perfect a line it is and one that goes a long way in distilling a complex, multifaceted film about two cousins running a small criminal enterprise out of their bar in working class Brooklyn. Cousin Marv (the late James Gandolfini) and his younger cousin Bob Saginowski (a perfectly cast Tom Hardy) are getting by, but are hardly living the high life. Years ago, Marv was forced to sell his establishment to Chechen gangsters. It’s something he’s never quite gotten over. Bob, on the other hand, seems to be perfectly fine with living a quiet, uneventful life as the bartender.

   In exquisite noir, or should I say neo-noir, fashion, the plot unfolds due to a series of coincidences, near coincidences, and bad luck.

   There are actually four separate strands to the compellingly bleak story that is The Drop. The first involves a plot hatched by Marv to steal from his own bar – technically, the bar owned by Chechen gangsters – in order to have money to keep his father on life support. The second concerns Bob’s interactions with a detective that he recognizes from church. The third revolves around the mystery surrounding the disappearance of a bar regular some years ago. The fourth story, and as it turns out the movie’s linchpin, concerns the budding romance between Bob and a local girl (Noomi Rapace). A romance, it should be noted, that begins when Bob discovers a beaten, abandoned dog in a garbage can in front of her home.

   It admittedly takes patience to watch and wait, as the story doesn’t unfold quickly. Rather the movie operates like a slow burner, amplifying the heat and the tension without the viewer exactly realizing what’s happening until it’s too late. There’s a big reveal in the end of the film, one in which the infamous line that I referenced at the beginning of this review is intimately tied to, but it’s also fun to watch everything leading up to that point.

   The cast is uniformly excellent and the movie doesn’t dumb things down for a mass audience. This is a sophisticated crime drama, one as much about characters and their personal journeys as much as about the crimes themselves.