You do not have to be a parent to appreciate that nothing could be worse than losing your own child. Lars von Trier took this notion to absurd extremes in Antichrist, controversially featuring a mourning mother’s self-circumcision. John Cameron Mitchell’s new film, Rabbit Hole, thankfully takes the same situation in an altogether subtler direction.

Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart (The Dark Knight) play Becca and Howie Corbett, a professional couple residing in what would be an exceedingly comfortable suburban home, had it not been for the death of their four-year-old son in a car accident. Unsurprisingly, the story of the Corbetts’ struggle to regain a semblance of normality eight months on, is rather slow to develop. The first hour of the film suffers from the necessary gradualness of its decided restraint. Numerous sequences of warmly lit domesticity, accompanied by a similarly tasteful score, are intermittently punctuated by laconic exchanges between Becca and Howie; this soon becomes complacent.

Kidman’s portrayal of the traumatised, exasperated Becca is straightforwardly believable. However, on a less tangible level neither Kidman’s nor Eckhart’s performances manage to grip the audience consistently, notwithstanding a few dramatic moments towards the end of the film. Instead, Rabbit Hole’s best performance comes from the unknown Miles Teller, who plays the seventeen year old who was involved in, if not responsible for, the death of the Corbetts’ son. Far more than his more experienced co-stars, Teller reveals an arrestingly nuanced sense of grief.

The sensitive yet understated tone of Rabbit Hole, comparable in some ways to Revolutionary Road, is its main achievement. But beyond this, the script feels lacking, achieving a superficiality and heavy handedness which cannot be attributed just to its intended minimalism. Becca has an outburst at a group counseling session against a fellow mourner’s belief in God’s divine plan – “I’d say God’s a sadistic prick”. Like much of the film, this moment purports to be hard-hitting, but proves contrived. For the most part, Rabbit Hole’s self-consciously muted air merely disguises what is really a fairly elementary exploration of an admittedly difficult subject matter.