The film’s most devastating scene is not the fire. It is later, in a police station. After giving his confession, Lee expects punishment. When the officer says, “You made a terrible mistake, but we’re not going to charge you,” Lee is confused. He asks, “So I can just go?” When the officer says yes, Lee stands, walks out of the room, and then—in one of the most haunting performances of restraint—grabs a guard’s gun and tries to kill himself. He fails. That is the true tragedy: he must continue living.

The turning point—or rather, the anti-turning point—comes when Lee runs into Randi on a snowy street. She has remarried and had another child. She is crying, begging for forgiveness for the cruel things she said after the fire. “I know I broke your heart,” she sobs. “I know you’ve died. But I want you to be okay.”

The genius of writer-director Kenneth Lonergan is in the structure. He intercuts the present with the past through flashbacks that hit like gut punches. In the present, Lee is a quiet, polite shell. In the past, we see him as a loving father of three, laughing with friends, drunk but happy. Then comes the night that shattered him. A mistake with a space heater. A fire. Three children dead. His wife, Randi (Michelle Williams), screaming in a stretcher.

The film opens on a frozen Massachusetts winter. Lee (Casey Affleck) is a janitor in Boston, shoveling snow, unclogging toilets, and getting into pointless bar fights. He is a ghost haunting his own life. When his brother Joe (Kyle Chandler) dies of a heart condition, Lee must return to the seaside town of Manchester-by-the-Sea to handle the estate.