The unnerving “Red Road” is a thriller that seems almost custom-made for the digital age, a mystery that manipulates proximity the same way most movies of this ilk rely on butcher knives, menacing late-night phone calls, and bombastic soundtracks.

The film, which make its premiere today at Landmark’s Sunshine Cinema, opens to a wall of security camera monitors, a room illuminated with real-time surveillance images being examined by Jackie (Kate Dickie), who clicks from camera to camera and turns from monitor to monitor, looking for anything suspicious in this endless virtual landscape.

As she presides over the images, she finds storylines to follow: A man walks his ailing old dog down the sidewalk on a daily basis; later, Katie becomes concerned as a man chases a woman through a dimly lit back alley before realizing they are only finding a hidden place to make love. “False alarm,” she tells her dispatcher over the phone.

And then, in a moment that evokes the voyeuristic horror of Hitchcock’s “Rear Window,” Jackie’s jaw drops as she grabs her joystick and zooms in on the man pulling up his trousers. Looking back at her from across the digital divide is a face she recognizes — a face she with which she becomes obsessed and consumed.

Directed by Andrea Arnold, who works with some loose allegiance to the hyperrealistic dictates of Lars Von Trier’s Dogme 95 movement and who has received accolades and awards for this, her first full-length feature (her Oscar-winning 2003 short film “Wasp” was an achievement of low-budget tension made simple), “Red Road” seems at first to be a movie about the nature of watching and being watched.

But Ms. Arnold is not interested in reiterating such hackneyed sentiments about an omniscient police state. Instead, her agenda is something more timely and titillating: a thriller rooted firmly in the digital age, a character study at once reliant upon and hindered by technology. Much as the Internet provides a forum where we can learn everything without ever knowing anyone, where we can interact with screen names without ever learning the names behind them, Jackie begins watching this man (Tony Curran), learning his daily routine and memorizing his every action (in one notable scene, she runs into another room so she can access the city’s traffic cameras and monitor his driving), but she remains trapped on the other side of the camera.

Ms. Arnold casts the audience’s relationship with Jackie using much the same dynamic. Just as we strive to learn more about our would-be heroine, watching her — through Ms. Arnold’s exaggerated close-ups and jagged camera angles — for any hint of disclosure in the weary, tired, worn face of Ms. Dickie, we remain frustratingly removed, unsure of how this man connects to her obvious pain.

From the outset, “Red Road” is a study of how someone can be so close yet so distant, about how Jackie can leave her surveillance booth and come within feet of this man, but fail to cross that last barrier. It’s a jarring sensation for a thriller to forsake the chase and the mysterious force of evil lurking in the shadows in favor of an intangible gulf dividing two people occupying the same room and, in one extraordinarily ambiguous and disturbing scene, the same bed.

Viewers must wait until the film’s final third for any of the movie’s characters to have a lengthy person-to-person conversation, and it’s to Ms. Arnold’s great credit as a filmmaker that she is able to begin and sustain a story with no narration and such little dialogue. This is essentially a silent film, working with a vocabulary almost entirely comprised of blurry television monitors, single-person stakeouts, and timid facial gestures, all building to the few moments when Jackie gets close to another human being and interaction seems imminent.

It’s an approach that Ms. Dickie bravely runs with, carrying the story on her back as she projects the air of a lonely woman yearning for human contact while denying the camera — often hovering just inches away — as well as a glimpse at the heart beating beneath her tough and tortured façade. She is fiery and broken, a fascinating force of strength and sorrow.

“Red Road” is not about watching a woman as she watches, but coming to learn why she watches. Those television cameras, Jackie seems to realize, were not connecting her with the world but shielding her from it, and her obsession is not about vengeance so much as her need to be asked for forgiveness — and then to forgive.