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Filled with mesmerizing visual sequences, director Joachim Trier’s “Louder Than Bombs” is a captivating though at times disjointed narrative exploring the nature of grief. Three years after the suicide of their mother, famous photojournalist Isabelle Reed (Isabelle Huppert), husband Gene (Gabriel Byrne) and two sons Jonah (Jesse Eisenberg) and Conrad (Devin Druid) still struggle to move on. As they try to understand the mother they barely knew, they are forced to confront the reality of their own personal failings.

Although the screenplay (from Trier and co-writer Eskil Vogt) occasionally meanders in transitions between each of the three men’s narratives, Trier more than compensates with a surfeit of beautiful montages, assisted by cinematographer Jakob Ihre. Memory is often intermingled with fantasy in juxtaposition to present-day reality, and scenes featuring the deceased Isabelle possess a lulling, dream-like quality. Another one of the film’s most memorable sequences features voiceover narration by Conrad set to a kaleidoscopic array of visuals.

Playing the character of the younger son Conrad, Druid has perhaps the film’s toughest role yet also some of its finest execution. The script initially renders him a wholly unsympathetic brat, but he manages to demonstrate the greatest emotional progression of any of the characters by the film’s end. Trier has a certain flair for capturing the distinct idiocy and immaturity of adolescence, which makes it even more rewarding to watch Conrad’s character grow. Although Eisenberg delivers a fine dramatic performance—a departure from his typecast previous roles as neurotic intellectuals—the script’s disjointedness does his narrative the greatest disservice, leaving the conclusion to his arc far from cathartic. Similarly, Byrne’s character seems to function exclusively as a narrative bridge between Jonah and Conrad, at the cost of his individual story. Even though the film leaves some narrative threads unsatisfyingly loose, its two hours are mostly well spent painting a nuanced portrait of a family after loss.