Everybody’s Fine appears to be a corny sap-story about an endearing old man, played by Robert De Niro, who embarks on an endearing cross-country voyage to reconnect with his grown-up children after the death of his wife. And, indeed, that’s what it is. However, there is something a little shocking here.

De Niro’s old man, named Frank, really is endearing; he crinkles up his face when he has funny conversations, and he crinkles frequently. He has spent most of his life coating telephone wire, and he talks, with dreamy self-deprecation, as if this were something like injecting stars with glow. Whether on a train across farm country or in a supermarket, he seems to move through a series of postcard frames, quietly admiring, happy just to breathe. “I’m always lucky,” he confides to a fellow passenger.

Yet Frank seems dangerously afraid of looking underneath the postcards. As he floats through the countryside, stops at warm little hotels, and tiptoes into the lives of his children, twinkly music plays, and with each encounter, we get a cutesy movie-magic glimpse of the offspring in question as a wee tyke. However, this is, trickily, more eerie than whimsical; Frank seems to cherish his own ambitions for his children more than the people they have actually become, hailing each as “my son, the conductor” or “my daughter, the dancer”. Each of the kids lies to him, and they mostly make excuses to cut his visit short. Clearly, they are hiding something from their endearing father; there is a nifty recurring sequence where scenic images of the telephone wires that Frank calls “my work” are accompanied by furtive phone conversations between Frank’s children about what story Frank must be told to distract him from the truth.

So the title is ironic; I expected as much. Because this is not evident from the start, however, the movie builds to a mesmerizing bleakness; we realize very slowly how far things are from fine, and yet the darkness still comes too fast. Director Kirk Jones tends to shift camera angles quickly and to emphasize weirdly far-away master shots; this seems like pictorial over-reaching at first, but it increasingly expresses restlessness and suspicion. The quirky strangers with whom Frank makes small talk progress from mildly crotchety at worst to prophets of doom at best. The breaking point seems to come when a smiling truck driver (Melissa Leo) gives Frank a ride; she keeps smiling as she tells Frank about her husband’s death by alcoholism and, as if amused, expresses her opinion that “these days,” we are literally killing ourselves through habitual excess while convincing ourselves that “everything’s fine.” What a quirky supporting character on this endearing road trip.

We crash right through the breaking point in a very strange scene that looks like it was shot in the tunnels of the New Haven train station, which are encased in long, thin rings of harsh metal lines. Frank approaches a young man slumped on the ground; the young man yells, “Don’t touch me.” Frank offers money; the young man takes it and stalks off. Everything happens very slowly; no communication occurs. Frank mutters, “You could’ve said thank you.” The young man turns back around and commits an utterly purposeless act of violence against the old man, as if fulfilling a necessary ritual.