Alonso’s latest feature once again follows a lonely traveler in search of his past, a brooding seaman who, like Ulysses, returns to his native land after years at sea, yearning for home and family. A film of infrequent words and profound gestures, Liverpool offers a snow-blinded and poetic variation of the Western, a meditation on the perils and, perhaps, obscure pleasures of drifting without direction or claim to land. Alonso’s careful distillation of narrative somehow both abstracts and intensifies the film’s emotional register, balancing its existential fable with a dark, bleak humor. Alonso’s camera finds a new freedom in Liverpool, choreographing beautiful long takes and driven by a searching energy that often leads it away from the purported focus of the story to point towards other worlds waiting to be discovered.