PHIL MORRISON'S impressive debut film is about the ties that bind - the push and pull of family life which make us want to embrace it and withdraw from it at the same time. An opening scene shows father Eugene (Scott Wilson) standing in a bedroom, patiently inflating an air mattress in expectation of the family's guests.

This sort of glance into the banal is typical of Junebug - small moments fuse together and expand slowly until they become pregnant with meaning.

And the result is strangely comforting. The scary home truths uncovered could be found in any family. And Morrison goes about this business with such candour and ease, that watching it relives moments of your own favourite family barney.

Junebug is written by Angus MacLachlan. He wrote the script for Morrison's award-winning short film Tater Tomater in 1990 and, strangely, it has taken them until now to get a big-screen debut. It boasts an exemplary cast. Amy Adams, who plays a sunny daughter-in-law called Ashley, came from virtual anonymity to be nominated for a Best Actress award at this year's Oscars. She nearly steals the film, but to focus on her would be unfair to the rest of the cast, whose exquisite performances are a study in understated complexity.

The story is about son George (Alessandro Nivola) who returns home to visit his family for the first time in three years with new wife Madeleine (Emberth Davidtz). The real reason they have left Chicago for rural North Carolina is that art dealer Madeleine is determined to get a local artist onto her books. They were lovers at first sight, and married a week later, but George's mother Peg (Celia Weston) doesn't take to her.

"She's too smart, she's too pretty, " she chides her husband. Peg is toxic, a female equivalent of John McGahern's abusive father figure, Moran. She has a cold mouth and a withering stare.

She unleashes bitterness on everybody else. She admonishes Johnny, the other son who still lives at home with his heavily pregnant wife, Ashley, while her put-upon husband Eugene meets her casual abuse with silence. Johnny is as bitter and resentful as his mother, and as incapable of expressing it as his father. He treats Ashley with disdain and ignores the new guests.

Somehow, Ashley seems oblivious to all the dysfunction, while George is only too aware. It is easy to see why he doesn't come home too often and that Madeleine, the polar opposite of this family, brings him some kind of solace.

What at first seems to be a showdown between simple churchgoing folk and sophisticated city types soon turns into something much more complex. Madeleine draws Peg's disapproval with her androgynous looks but Madeleine hardly puts a foot wrong. She takes to Ashley's childish chirping, and attends church meetings and the traditional baby shower.

It is George who shirks family time.

When crisis strikes, however, true colours are shown. George takes to his responsibilities, while Madeleine is revealed as someone whose priorities are elsewhere. "It means something, " George tells her down the phone.

"What?" she says. "Family."

The details are subtle. The revelations are like little tremors.

Director Morrison goes about his business unobtrusively, without any grandstanding or epiphanies granted to characters gazing forlornly out of windows. The human foibles that are revealed hold up as universal and true.

While it is much in the vein of American independent cinema, it is the kind of film that can be traced back to the work of Yazugiro Ozu - meditations on family where judgement is carefully withheld. And Morrison too cuts to similar Ozu-like moments of reflection between scenes - well-tended front gardens and butterflies hovering over a lawn.

These pauses take us outside the film, and seem to suggest that life goes on elsewhere, and in much a similar fashion.