Island life: "Archipelago"

Archipelago, Joanna Hogg's follow-up to the very promising Unrelated, centres upon a family gathering on the Isles of Scilly. While mum (Kate Fahy, above right) brushes up on her painting, her highly strung daughter Cynthia (Lydia Leonard) frets about the plans of her gadabout brother Edward (Tom Hiddleston) to jack everything in to become an aid worker in Africa. A more immediate concern is the growing closeness between Edward and the family's live-in chef Rose (Amy Lloyd), a relationship that only serves to underline Cynthia's own growing isolation. Some holiday this is: everyone's on edge, anyway, from the absence of the family patriarch, detained on the mainland for reasons unknown - and reduced to a distant voice on a telephone wielded by one rich neurotic or another.

These heated conversations are few and far between, actually. Much of Archipelago consists of contemplative silences, asking us to infer whatever we might from the sight of Edward changing into his pyjamas, or a tableau of the family waiting to be called into lunch, and - as in her first feature - Hogg sets a particular stall in this between-time, which is a risky ploy for a film pushing two hours. There were graspable tensions at play in Unrelated - between the outsider heroine and the group she'd entered into - but Archipelago is solely one family's business, and it sometimes seems as though the idling indecisiveness of this unit (who can't, we discover, choose a table in a restaurant where there are NO OTHER PATRONS) has started to seep into the film itself.

One of the supporting characters is a landscape painter (Christopher Baker), teaching Fahy's mum to wield a brush in anger, and a sympathetic observer might say Hogg is engaged in a similar activity herself: photographing the Scilly scenery, noting the changing of the light, and scanning the objects within her frame of vision, the way these characters relate to one another, weighing up the distances between them all. Certain images - that of Leonard stretched out on her bed, or Hiddleston framed by an arch of trees - do indeed betray a painter's eye. Yet having thus sized up the canvas and her subjects, Hogg appears reticent to sketch in the precise nature of the drama playing out here.

Early encounters suggest an awkward comedy of manners - shuffling up against the proper protocols for inviting a chef to dinner, or returning a plate of guinea fowl to the kitchen - but just when it looks as though darker clouds are set to blow in, Archipelago settles into a stalling pattern, giving us full and uninterrupted lessons in the preparation of pheasants and lobsters, and it takes a bullet, or more precisely a piece of lead shot lodged in a plate of game (a minority concern, one suspects, if one that pins down the film's social milieu absolutely), to nudge matters along to a sort-of conclusion. While instructing Fahy one afternoon, the painter promotes the idea that "chaos is where you get ideas". Yet Archipelago is wholly tidy and tasteful, deadeningly so in places, as though we were biding our time waiting for no more than the next issue of Country Life or Good Housekeeping to drop through the family letterbox.

There remain elements to cheer in Hogg's progress. The manner in which she claims a small, underfilmed quadrant of the British Isles for herself is encouraging; and the unforced, naturalistic performance style she's fostered in her two films to date may yet yield a troupe of ruddy-cheeked, RADA-trained rivals to rival the tykes in Shane Meadows movies. (In their own ways, both the passive-aggressive Leonard and the slightly drippy Baker - "My tutor said I wasn't tough enough to go to art school" - catch the film's tenor perfectly, although Hiddleston, a moptopped posh boy in Unrelated, is hardly stretched here in the role of a moptopped posh boy called Edward.) I just wish the filmmaker had moved on with greater urgency - with less of the weak-chinned dithering - and a clearer sense of where she herself stands in relation to her landed characters, because the drift into abstraction, this studied neutrality, does neither her nor her audience many favours. If this were Watercolour Challenge, Hannah Gordon would have timed her out before the ad break.

Archipelago opens in selected cinemas from today.