Dig your father’s grave yourselves, with your own hands. That is the dying wish of an estranged parent, and Rodrigo García hangs his whole film on it. The old man also asked to be buried in the nude, which makes his sons’ errand stranger still. A spade is a better prop than a flashback. It gives the film a task and a place to stand, and it puts two men who have kept their distance side by side at the same hole in the ground, with no polite way out of the conversation.

Raymond (Ewan McGregor) and Ray (Ethan Hawke) are half brothers, and their father’s death pulls them back together. Early on, Raymond drives through a rainy night to a remote cabin to bring Ray the news. Ray is a recovering heroin addict who gave up the trumpet, partly to spite the father who pushed him toward it. Raymond has an office job and a marriage that is coming apart. The brothers have not seen each other in nearly five years, and neither has an easy relationship with the dead man. The official synopsis says they will work out who they have become, partly because of their father and partly in spite of him. That is more or less what García, who also wrote the script, sets out to do. He pitches the tone somewhere between funeral-parlour gloom and a shrug. The film is billed as a comedy-drama, but the humour is dry and sparing, and sometimes barely humour at all. The characters seem too tired to be solemn, and the film is at its most honest when it lets them be tired.

McGregor and Hawke carry the picture, and neither angles for a showpiece scene. McGregor keeps Raymond buttoned up and watchful, a man whose job and collapsing marriage seem to have left him with very little slack. Hawke lets Ray hang loose, a man who has already lost the worst fights and no longer bothers to defend himself. Side by side, the two styles make the brothers’ history believable without anyone pausing to explain it. One has spent years managing the damage; the other stopped managing anything. Both men have kept a sense of humour despite growing up in the shadow of a bad father, and neither actor leans on it for effect. The jokes are made quietly, the way people make them at a graveside, and nobody winks at the audience. Hawke gets the finest material around the trumpet, an instrument Ray walked away from out of spite and which his father, as it turns out, had refurbished a few weeks before he died. It is a small reversal, and it lands harder than any speech would. Ray cannot argue with a trumpet, thank it or throw it back, and the film has the sense to leave him with that.

What works best is simple. Digging a grave is work, and men who cannot talk about a parent can often talk about the job in front of them. With a spade in their hands, the brothers always have something to do while they say nothing. Feeling surfaces in the middle of a chore, while the two are ostensibly discussing something else, and García writes that well. For a good stretch the comedy and the sadness feel like one mood, with the labour supplying the dryness and the silences supplying the rest. Then the burial fills up with other people, the mood thins, and the film starts hedging.

The actors around the brothers deserve better than the script gives them. Maribel Verdú and Sophie Okonedo, as Lucia and Kiera, most obviously need more room, and Vondie Curtis-Hall, as Reverend West, brings a calm authority to the graveside that the writing never quite earns. These are performers who can build a person out of a couple of scenes, and they make the world around the grave feel lived in rather than staged. The script keeps them at the margins. Verdú’s Lucia knew the father in his last years, and Okonedo’s Kiera met him in his final days, so both hold a version of the man the brothers never knew. Yet each mostly works as a door into the brothers’ story, and just as you begin to want to hear what is on the other side, she steps aside.

The film’s ambitions outrun the space it has. García wants to say something about inheritance, about resentment and about the shape a bad father leaves in the men he raised, and he wants to be funny about all of it. A single burial has only so much room. The brothers are not the only people with a claim on the dead man. Lucia turns up with her son Simon, who is their brother as well, and a pair of fraternal twins arrive to say they are his sons too. Each new face loosens the film’s hold on the two men who should be at its centre. People arrive, say what they have come to say, and leave, and each one pulls attention away from the real question: what do Raymond and Ray actually think of each other? By the time the film gets back to it, some of the tension has gone slack.

The pacing suffers for it. The opening is brisk, with that late drive through the rain and the cabin, but the middle of the film sags. Some scenes run on after they have made their point, and some conversations circle the same feeling without adding to it. At 106 minutes the film is not long, yet it sometimes feels longer, which is odd for a story built around a single errand. A story this contained needs to keep moving, and it does not always.

Tonally, too, García asks a lot of his audience. A scene can begin with a joke about the absurd demands of a dying man and end in the kind of silence that makes you stop smiling, and the film does not always signal which way it is leaning. When it works, the unease is the point: grief really does behave like that, and families who have been hurt often laugh at the wrong moment. When it does not, the shifts feel unplanned, as if the film could not choose between a broader comedy and a bleaker drama and committed to neither. The father’s last wish shows both sides of this. Whether he meant it as a final act of control, a clumsy gesture toward his sons or a joke at their expense is never settled, and the film is wise to leave it open. It is less wise in the way it lets that question blur into every other question around it.

The late scenes show the problem most clearly. After the burial each brother is handed a letter from the man himself, a neat device that promises an answer, and Raymond’s outburst at the graveside and Ray’s decision to pick up the trumpet again are the strongest things the film offers. Both are physical, both come from the characters rather than from speeches, and both would hit harder if the film had spent more of its running time with the two of them alone. The best moments are the ones where one brother does something and the other has to decide how to respond.

There is something to be said for the title itself. Two names joined by an ampersand, neither one placed above the other, promise a film about a pair, and the best of it keeps that promise. When McGregor and Hawke share the frame, the picture has a centre of gravity. When the story wanders off to other mourners, it loses that pull, and the title starts to read like a reminder of what the film set out to be.

The film had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on 12 September 2022, opened in selected theaters on 14 October and arrived on Apple TV+ on 21 October. A streaming service is a sensible home for something this modest. It takes up an old question in drama: how do you get closure when the only thing that has changed is that the person who ruined your life is dead? García is honest enough not to pretend he has a tidy answer, and that restraint is to his credit.

The question is better than the execution, all the same. The material is thin in places, and García does not always find enough for his actors to do. What stays with you is not the plot but a few images: two men taking turns with a spade, a trumpet that was supposed to be gone, a pair of half brothers who can finally be in the same room without being sure why. The film clearly means what it says, but it never settles on what that is, and it asks the audience to be generous on its behalf. Many viewers will be, because McGregor and Hawke make that easy, and because a film this small can be forgiven a good deal when its two leads are so plainly at ease together.