The Girl and the Spider is a brilliantly maddening thing, a drama that plays by its own perplexing rules.

As in their first film, the Zürchers bring a fresh perspective to the connection between humans and the wild world, specifically within the story’s domestic trappings.

Narratively cagey as it may seem, “The Girl and the Spider” clearly, and affectingly, muses on farewells, change and our enduring or fleeting bonds to people and the places where we loved them.

You could grant The Girl and the Spider some grand symbolic reading … is this a European Union parable? – or just take it as a precise study of a particular domestic drama. It’s small and personal, but all the more intense for being so.