Trish has no passport, little money and a single protector in the government who is about to lose the power to shelter her. That is the whole predicament of Stars at Noon, and Claire Denis lets it press on every private scene. She adapts Denis Johnson’s 1986 novel, and the politics never stay outside the door. The pace is slow, deliberately so. We are asked to sit in a flophouse with Trish while the country comes apart around her.

Denis lifts the story out of the 1980s revolution and sets it in present-day Nicaragua, with pandemic-era instability and an authoritarian government in place of the revolutionaries. The update works. Desperation has a texture we recognise. Trish (Margaret Qualley) is a travel writer whose coverage of extrajudicial killings has turned both her editors and the ruling party against her, and she trades sex with officials for money and basic necessities. Then she approaches Daniel (Joe Alwyn), a Briton staying in a hotel reserved for wealthy foreigners, who introduces himself as a petrochemicals consultant. Trish decides he must be an intelligence agent. Denis never settles it. For a while the doubt pulls us forward; later it just hangs there, and I stopped waiting for an answer.

Stars at Noon competed for the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2022 and won the Grand Prix, although the festival reviews were mixed. Critics praised Qualley and found fault with the pacing and with the chemistry between her and Alwyn. On the second point I agree with them. The first encounter sets the terms of the relationship, need and suspicion first and then a tenderness neither of them seems to have planned, but only one of the two actors seems to be building it. Qualley does nearly all the work. Alwyn gives her very little to push against.

The imbalance is easier to forgive when she carries a scene alone. Qualley plays Trish’s defiance and her fear in the same breath, so that one look can read as panic and as calculation at once. The best sequence is the dance in a deserted nightclub, where Daniel talks about his wife. The romance peaks there, and it works because we watch Trish decide to trust a man she has every reason to doubt. Take her out and the film would have very little to hold onto.

The heat is the film’s other strong presence. The air looks thick and sticky from the first scene to the last, and you can almost feel it on your skin. The chase through a market, in which the Costa Rican cop (Danny Ramirez) pursues the two of them, is one of the few moments where the film speeds up, and it is welcome. Benny Safdie, as the CIA man, is the most alert performer in a cast that mostly plays at half speed. When he turns up on the road and offers Trish safe passage to the United States in exchange for Daniel, he brings a quiet menace that no one around him quite matches, and the offer makes the stakes plain: Trish has to decide what Daniel is worth to her.

Elsewhere the film is murkier. The political intrigue blurs, and who works for whom, and why, never comes into focus. Denis is plainly interested in exploitation, sexual and political, and in whether Trish will end up betraying the man she has come to love. That question is the sharpest idea in the film. But the romance that should carry it often feels transactional rather than transformative, and I never felt the pull of the lovers’ bond. The languid rhythm builds atmosphere, yet at times it looks like a way of dodging answers.

John C. Reilly, as the American magazine editor, and the other supporting players are pushed to the edges of the story. Their scenes are brief and leave little behind.

The ending is the strongest stretch. Soldiers surround the two fugitives, Daniel persuades Trish to leave him, and he is taken away. A Nicaraguan police officer, a former client of hers, returns her passport so she can fly home, and the CIA man pays her and goes. It is cold and abrupt, and it stays with you longer than much of what came before.

This is recognisably a Claire Denis film, but not one of her tightest. Qualley holds it together, Safdie enlivens it, and Alwyn’s Daniel stays a blur. I admired it in pieces and wished the whole had the precision of its closing minutes.