The Australian director Ray Lawrence seems to have a keen interest in corpses. As in his last film, the acclaimed “Lantana,” Mr. Lawrence’s new drama is haunted by the body of a dead woman. The crime occurs early in “Jindabyne,” but the repercussions resound for the rest of the movie for a couple with problems in a small town in New South Wales. And, boy, do they resound in this busy, relentless, and ultimately self-defeating expansion of Raymond Carver’s short story “So Much Water So Close to Home.”

You might remember the bewildering shot in Robert Altman’s “Short Cuts” when Huey Lewis urinates off a cliff and thereby points our eyes to a corpse floating in the water below. The same Carver premise that gave Altman one plot strand among many provides the kernel for Mr. Lawrence’s new film: Fishing buddies chance upon a half-nude body but, unwisely and irrevocably, opt to finish out their weekend before reporting it to the police. There was nothing, as they saw it, that they could do for her anyway.

This thoughtlessness compounds the pain of the crime, but death, absence, and decay are latent from the outset in “Jindabyne.” The marriage of one of the four fishing buddies, Stewart (Gabriel Byrne), is still scarred by his wife Claires’ (Laura Linney) breakdown after the birth of their child. Going gray, Stewart has failed to come to terms with his fallen lot as a garage mechanic after a youth spent racing cars competitively. Their son is sweet and timid but has latched on to a morbid friend who draws him into euthanizing the class pet.

Stewart, in a state of numbed denial after the fishing expedition, waits a day to tell Claire, which sets her seething in disbelief and disillusionment. Their poisoned relationship is the focus of “Jindabyne,” but the other guys and their wives suffer similar strain as the indecency of the fishing trip boils into a news story. One couple already has their hands full taking care of their orphaned granddaughter (the pet killer); another, younger pair, from the next generation, is more sensitive to the situation but remains disconnected while living out of a van with their new baby.

Besides relocating Carver’s story to the southeast of Australia from the Pacific Northwest, Mr. Lawrence adds a racial dynamic by implanting tensions over the victim, who is an Aboriginal. Her family harasses Stewart and his friends and suggests that they would never have treated a white woman in the same way. It’s more than Claire can take, and she reaches out, with overwrought obsession, to the unreceptive Aboriginal family. Like the film’s presiding metaphor, a dam-submerged town near Jindabyne, whose old church steeple pokes above the water, there’s always more fraught history just below the surface.

As in “Lantana,” which introduces its interlinked urban tales with an unexplained murder, Mr. Lawrence here uses the torment and suspicion of an unsolved crime to tease out the long-standing grievances that already roil among the ordinary people involved. His deliberate approach to “Jindabyne” remains at a constant simmer through his tendency to black out scenes before they come to a point of rest. There’s also something unsparing about the horizon-wide light of the pregnant Australian landscape, which seems to speak, whenever a long shot appears, with the keening vocals of the score.

But “Jindabyne” builds, explodes, and dissipates without having enough confidence in its characters. The mood of redemption, recrimination, and desperation is all carefully worked out, but Mr. Lawrence unwisely inverts the thought processes in Carver’s story with a surfeit of events and elaborations. Despite all the drama, we ultimately never get deeper than Mr. Byrne’s hangdog visage and Ms. Linney’s hectic martyrdom.

The film’s resolution — begrudging communion at the victim’s traditional funeral among the rocks and brambles of nature — is no more satisfying or particularly credible. It’s of a piece with Mr. Lawrence’s ill-advised decision to include the dead woman’s murderer, an old truck-driving handyman with a faintly ridiculous Amish beard. With apologies to the short-fiction teaching cliché, the director might have done better showing a little less and letting his characters tell us more.