Nora's Will

Writer-director Mariana Chenillo stays in that room — rather, the chicly appointed urban apartment where the title character held court — for much of the movie, rarely venturing into the open air. Nora would have wanted it that way: After many earlier suicide attempts, she has finally swallowed a fatal dose of pills on the eve of Passover, leaving the table set for a Seder no one really wants to attend. Coffee is warming in the pot; the fridge is full of Tupperware and instructions. Talmudic red tape prevents her from being buried for several days, and her corpse rests benignly on her bedroom floor, wrapped and iced. The grandkids are fascinated.

Her long-suffering ex-husband, José (Fernando Luján), is just fed up, and the sneaky dark comedy of “Nora’s Will’’ comes from his attempts to spite the exasperating love of his life even in death. A weary old atheist, José early on tangles with the egotistical rabbi (Max Kerlow), who’s certain he knows how “Dora’’ should be sent off. The rabbi’s truly a pill, even if José does go out of his way to bait him with a ham and sausage pizza.

As the apartment fills up with friends and relatives — a beloved housekeeper (Angelina Peláez), a scattershot aunt (Verónica Langer), a sweet-faced Jewish attendant (Enrique Arreola) — Chenillo gently prompts us to wonder how best to remember the dead. Should a human being’s flaws be celebrated or swept under the rug? Nora and José’s son, Rubén (Ari Brickman), is a good Jew and a good dad and also quite a bit duller than his reprobate father; what Nora eventually asks of him is simply that he be a good son, too, rather than the grown-up he has struggled to be.

José, for his part, wrestles with hints of his ex-wife’s infidelity, and the scenes in which he tries to muscle his way into her writing desk are deft comic miniatures. Flashbacks show us the couple in their passionate youth but “Nora’s Will’’ is mostly about living amid the fumes of age and compromise, after the fires have burned themselves out.

If you can’t get on its wavelength, the movie may leave you baffled. Chenillo uses the tiniest gestures to illuminate the big issues with which she’s playing: where religious faith becomes comfort and where toxic ritual, what we owe the dead and what they owe us, when and how — and if — a difficult life can be forgiven. The tone is tricky, sliding along a tightrope of farce and wistfulness, but Luján especially walks it like a pro, his ruined leonine face registering cynicism, shock, and the embarrassment of grief. “Nora’s Will’’ leaves the strong-arm tactics to the dead — it’s a wise film that doesn’t insist on its own wisdom.

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.