The crystalline waters and gruff bonhomie of Greece are a far cry from the provinces of China, but Singapore-born director Anthony Chen has traversed those locales in his two recent films, “The Breaking Ice” and, now, “Drift.” 

The change in locale isn’t the only thing that’s different. “Drift” is Mr. Chen’s first English-language film, but not, as reports have it, his last. The next picture, “Secret Daughter,” will take Mr. Chen to America and India. If we must have globalism, best that it be embodied in the hands of a humanist gifted with a gentle, meditative touch. Mr. Chen is that man.

“Drift” is based on the novel “A Marker to Measure Drift” by Alexander Maksik, who collaborated on the screenplay with Susanne Farrell. The setting is an unnamed Greek island — a keen-eyed acquaintance pegs it as an amalgam of different parts of the country — and the subject is the psychological dislocations of being a refugee. 

Except that Jacqueline (Cynthia Erivo) isn’t the kind of refugee we’ve been reading about in news reports for close to a decade now. Jacqueline hails not from the Middle East, but the West African country of Liberia. How she arrived in Greece is never explained, nor why it is that Jacqueline ended up in Greece in particular. Yet there she is, on a beach — bereft of money, housing, and friends.

Life in Liberia is explained through a series of flashbacks. Jacqueline’s father is an official in the government. The family travels among the privileged classes. A machine gun-wielding security detail at their spacious home hints at a level of societal unrest. The township surrounding their house confirms it, what with the troubling incidents seen from the back window of the family’s chauffeured limousine. Jacqueline, on break from school at London, could not have returned at a worse time.

But that was then and this is now. Jacqueline trawls the beaches of Greece for a safe place to sleep. She earns extra cash by giving foot massages to tourists on the beach using olive oil cribbed from a nearby taverna. This statuesque woman with the British accent otherwise remains aloof from those around her — not least, African street vendors and the police. She sleeps in a cave and is diligent about her hygiene. Jacqueline makes a point of keeping her dignity.

Jacqueline’s presence does not go unnoticed. An American tour guide, Callie (Alia Shawkat from “Arrested Development”), strikes up a conversation with Jacqueline while her charges are given time to walk amongst the ruins at an archeological site. If Jacqueline is something of a mystery, by turns intensely aloof and emotionally scattered, Callie is forthright and generous. Still, her outgoing nature can’t disguise an air of loneliness.

A mutual need for companionship, and perhaps more, powers the second half of “Drift.” Truth to tell, once Ms. Shawkat enters the proceedings, the film gains in traction. To say as much is less a slight on Ms. Erivo’s performance than it is a marker of a script that keeps Jacqueline at too much of a distance for too long. Mr. Maksik and Ms. Farrell overplay Jacqueline’s anomie to a point where the audience, though keyed into the circumstances behind her erratic and sometimes self-defeating behavior, becomes exasperated.

Waylaying sympathy is a questionable dramatic device. If Mr. Chen ultimately brings Jacqueline’s emotional reawakening to a kind of fruition, it comes at the cost of a film whose internal rhythms are alternately too measured and too fractured to establish a convincing sense of compassion. As a result, we admire “Drift” less for its accomplishments than for its ambitions.