‘Wonderful Town,” directed by Thai filmmaker Aditya Assarat, takes place in a seaside town in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami. Though tourism has tanked, some rebuilding is in progress, and yet a certain malaise seems to have settled after the storm. This potent setting and mood is the backdrop for a fragile love story, but the stillness and vaguely drawn characters doom the movie to off-putting inertia.

Mr. Assarat’s film, which begins a weeklong run Friday at Anthology Film Archives, won a top award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and was featured here in the New Directors/New Films series. Although the film’s fraught setting and the director’s initially graceful touch have proved worthy features, they feel like flashes of promise rather than the markers of a fully realized film.

“Wonderful Town” begins with the mutual acquaintance of Na (Anchalee Saisoontorn), who runs a small hotel, and Ton (Supphasit Kansen), a city-schooled architect visiting to oversee a nearby construction site. While most people stay closer to the town center, Ton prefers Na’s plainer, quieter establishment, where her personal service, at first, seems a result of the fact that there are no other guests around.

Na’s serenity is of a piece with the verdant hills that loom benevolently behind the town. Newcomer Ton restlessly pokes around the skeletal hulk of another hotel gutted by the tsunami storm and rumored to be haunted. Na is amused after hearing him, through the walls, singing in the shower; during the day she stretches out on his bedsheets in his absence in a schoolgirlish reverie. Soft-spoken romance flutters into being between the two; he playfully quotes song lyrics to her.

Glowering in the wings is Na’s troubled and overprotective brother, Wit (Dul Yaambunying). While Na displays an unassuming resilience, Wit seems to stand in for the town’s unsettled post-tsunami spirit. When the couple goes for a drive on a curvy road, a gang of kids on motorbikes half-taunts, half-threatens them by languidly fishtailing in the path of their car. The sticking point is Ton’s outsider status, and that he is interfering with a local girl.

It’s with the development of this provincial impulse that Mr. Assarat’s delicate film definitively falls apart. What clinches the film’s downfall is the sucker punch of an ending, which puts a brutal, predictable cap on the menace hovering over the frowned-upon relationship. This is shortly followed by the cheap found poetry of two girls in tutus, which, again, feels like something rustled up from the Sundance rummage bin. Likewise, the strummed-guitar score flirts with a precious sense of juxtaposition.

Obviously Mr. Assarat has closer ties with his becalmed counterparts in his own country’s cinema, its star being Apichatpong Weerasethakul, with his inimitable creations exploring desire, trust, wonder, and light. But “Wonderful Town,” for all its ambient mood, feels more like a framework or an idea than a film, and you’re not quite sure how you’d feel about it if you’d never heard the backstory. Explanations of Na’s eye-of-the-storm quietude or a fleshed-out sense of the town are among the deficiencies that overshadow the sadness presented as the film’s core.