"It's one of the things that drives it in the first place," says writer-director Sue Brooks (Japanese Story, Road To Nhill), "the idea that you never quite [get] the full picture of people's lives." For that reason, she's opted for a slightly fractured narrative, despite the story's apparent simplicity – significance emerges out of order and unpredictability, bleakness and comedy co-exist in ways you don't expect.

Looking for Grace is the tale of Grace (Odessa Young) a teenage girl who goes missing in rural Western Australia, and of her anxious parents, Denise and Dan (Radha Mitchell and Richard Roxburgh) who go in search of her. The viewer might expect that the quest will take some time, but it is resolved sooner that you would expect; there are other puzzles that we will be faced with along the way. Yet, in the midst of anxiety and absurdity there's something restrained about the film's approach. Brooks likes movies that have the confidence to be quiet. "Film is one of those great places where we can have a moment of meditation," she says. In a contemporary world of distractions – "and I'm one of the most easily distracted people you could ever meet" she adds – "I love the fact that when you go into a cinema, you can watch a story unfold in its own way. I love the idea of just sitting there with people, with a landscape, there in the moment."

There are two main locations, one external, one interior: the expansive landscape, and the tightly wound, neat home that Denise has constructed for herself and her family. Both are closely connected to the people that the film portrays. "I wanted characters you love and feel attached to, that you would feel warm about their haplessness. But at the same time I was interested in the aloneness of life, as opposed to loneliness. And we looked for that in images, not to underline it, but to feel it, as well as telling the story.

Going out into the wheatbelt in search of locations, she says, "we would have moments of grace ourselves". The crew bent over backwards during the shoot, so that the timing worked out, and they could film in what she calls an "honest" way. "So that we can say, "This is what the light looks that at this time of day. It has an effect, and people get it, I think."

As well as the sadness of disconnection that is part of Dan and Denise's strained relationship, there are moments of hilarity and deft comedy. "They are both very funny actors," Brooks says, "and the material was there for them to play with. They added so much to it in the way they looked at each other and sat in the scenes together. It's the space between them, I think, that's really interesting." This is true of Mitchell and Roxburgh, she says, and also of Roxburgh and Terry Norris, who plays a private detective hired to help the parents in their quest. "That's why I love those big wide shots, where you feel as if you're just watching them, rather than being told all the time where to go with it."

Similarly, the comic elements do not lock down or characterise, particularly when it comes to the figure of Denise: there's a space around her, and an intriguing element of self-awareness, even at the most unlikely moments. "There's something about what Radha's done with the character that you can't quite nail, and I love that," Brooks says. When they were in in the early stages, of the film, "When she was asking me the routine questions about Denise that an actor might ask a director, I'd say, I don't really know, let's go in there and play." So, with Denise, "she put stuff in, as if she has another world that I can't quite touch: there's something going on with her all the time."

At various stages, Brooks says, she got a certain amount of pressure to fill in more gaps or expand some characters. "We knew we were stepping out of the box a bit, of the way people think films should be made these days." She's not criticising film agencies, she says, just noting that they have become risk-averse. "If they know how a film should work, they want to steer you towards that. Eventually there were people who knew and loved it for what it was."