Shannon Pufahl’s Kirkus-starred 2019 novel, On Swift Horses, feels more like a tone poem than a narrative with a clear beginning, middle, and end. It tells the largely separate stories of two queer characters: a young wife in 1950s California, and her drifter brother-in-law in Nevada, both struggling along as they seek an ineffable something to complete their unsatisfying lives. Things do happen over the course of the story, but they don’t fit into a tidy three-act structure, and Pufahl’s prose spins up appealing images of sad, good-looking characters inhabiting sun-bleached landscapes. A new film, starring Normal People’s Daisy Edgar-Jones and Saltburn’s Jacob Elordi, leans into that visual aspect, often to the exclusion of much else. It premieres in theaters on April 25.

The year is 1956, and 20-something Muriel and her new husband, Lee, have moved from Kansas to San Diego; they don’t have a lot of money, but she sells her mother’s house back home so they can buy a plot of land. Although Muriel loves Lee, she’s vaguely unhappy with her lot in life. Waiting tables, she overhears a tip on a horse race; when she goes to a racetrack to act on it, she finds that the thrilling act of gambling fulfills a need she didn’t know she had. Around the same time, she meets her new neighbor, a single woman named Sandra, who raises chickens; they hit it off immediately, and when Sandra offers Muriel her very first olive—which she finds “disorienting” as she tastes “under the saltiness something plummy, rich as jam”—it’s the first hint that Muriel may have another, greater passion yet to explore.

Muriel and Lee are briefly visited by Lee’s aimless brother, Julius; Muriel finds him fascinating, although he soon flees. The narrative alternates between his and Muriel’s stories, which rarely intersect. Ever since Julius was kicked out of the Army for acting on his attraction to another man, he’s been eking out a hand-to-mouth existence in Nevada. He’s a skilled gambler and a proficient cheater, which leads him to get a job spotting less-adept cheaters at a casino. There, he makes a romantic connection with his co-worker Henry, stirring up deep feelings.

The prose feels simultaneously pensive and melodramatic, as if it drifted in from the novels of a past era. Right from the start, Pufahl conjures a world where racehorses are “obdurate” and winds are “punkish.” It’s a style that creates a sense of distance but also yields moments of undeniable beauty, as strong emotions often seem just out of reach: Love is “improbable” and “always somewhere outside oneself.…It could happen to anyone and it could happen a thousand times or only once or never.”

The novel’s ending is not without hope, but it flows naturally from the angst that came before it. In the movie, director Daniel Minahan and screenwriter Bryce Kass awkwardly shift the tone in a final shot that feels jarringly Hollywood, depicting a character literally riding into the sunset (on a swift horse, no less).

Still, the film retains the hazy wistfulness of its source material, due in large part to the gorgeous cinematography by Luc Montpellier (Women Talking). However, without Pufahl’s rich narration, much of the movie consists of shots of very attractive people staring contemplatively into the middle distance, punctuated by sex scenes in artfully lit bedrooms. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and the well-cast Edgar-Jones and Elordi imbue their performances with a compelling anxiousness; Will Poulter, as Lee, and Sasha Calle, as Sandra, bring welcome gravitas to their underwritten roles. In the end, though, the film feels less like Pufahl’s haunting, meditative tale of love and desire, and more like a very expensive period soap opera. Still, at its best, it recalls the vivid melodramas of director Douglas Sirk; if it’s not an homage on the order of Far From Heaven (2002), it does provide a pleasant escape—if only for a couple hours.

David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.