The lead character in “Nothing Personal” is You. She’s a 20-something woman with fiery red hair and a temperament to match, and she refuses to give her name. So people call her just You.
When we first see her, You is moving out of her Amsterdam apartment after her marriage has broken up. Next thing, she’s hitchhiking across Ireland, pitching her blue tent in one anonymous field after another.
After several testy encounters with the locals, she chances upon Martin (Stephen Rea, of “The Crying Game”), a dour widower who offers her a job working around his secluded house in exchange for room and board.
Their relationship is to be strictly platonic, and she insists upon sleeping outside. But she eventually accepts Martin’s offer of a room of her own. Can more intimate encounters between the two misfits be far behind?
Director-writer Urszula Antoniak, in her first big-screen feature, keeps dialogue to a minimum while concentrating on visual style.
Dutch-born Lotte Verbeek is solid as You, a role that won her the best-actress prize at the Locarno Film Festival. (I’m reminded of Sandrine Bonnaire’s drifter in Agnes Varda’s 1985 “Vagabond.”)
Rea is laid-back — if he were any more so he’d be comatose. But his performance works perfectly with Verbeek’s.