Sometimes something as insignificant as a minor box office success story can reaffirm your faith in the film industry, even in life in general. One such story is The Visitor. A gentle, hopeful movie with no big name stars and no muscular marketing budget, it has charmed, city by city, the audiences of America, growing from an initial release on a handful of screens to a place in the top ten weekly box office earners, alongside behemoth releases like Indiana Jones and Iron Man. This beautifully nuanced character-study, with its liberal-leaning, very human take on the hot-button topic of immigration, has elicited an intensely emotional response from audiences who are so invested in the characters by the end of the movie that the writer/director Tom McCarthy and star Richard Jenkins are regularly besieged by fans demanding to know what happens next. Speculation about nominations and awards is gathering strength.

The film’s ecstatic reception has come as a relief to McCarthy, a character actor who wrote and directed his acclaimed first feature film, The Station Agent, in 2003. “I don’t know if I could have made a more delicate movie, for better or for worse. And I worried about that. Is there a place in our marketplace – particularly here in this country - for these types of movies? It’s like sending your kid off to school – he’s a little too thin and he has buck teeth and big glasses and you go, he has a good soul, I just hope they treat him OK. But I have been really pleasantly surprised with the way it has been going.”

The central character is Walter Vale, brilliantly played with an awkward angularity and an unexpected innocence by Jenkins. A widowed college professor, we meet Walter as he is briskly dismissing yet another piano teacher – his fifth. It’s not until later that we learn that his late wife was a concert pianist. The lessons are his way of keeping her music and her presence alive in his life. Walter has lost any passion for his subject – economics – that he may once have had. He whines and squirms when his college department head insists that he goes to New York to present a paper. But when he arrives at the Manhattan apartment he used to share with his wife, everything changes: he finds two strangers living there. Tarek is Lebanese, with an expansive smile and a set of djembe drums which he plays in jazz clubs and jam sessions; his Senegalese girlfriend Zainab is more wary of Walter. On a whim, he lets them stay. Tarek repays him with drum lessons, and a friendship develops between the two.

But after an unfortunate misunderstanding with a subway turnstile, Tarek is arrested. And since he’s in the US illegally, he is incarcerated in an immense, forbidding detention centre. Walter champions his case, engaging the services of an immigration lawyer. It’s a while before he realises how hopeless and dehumanising it is for Tarek. Meanwhile, Tarek’s mother Mouna (a warm, wise turn from Arab Israeli actress Hiam Abbass) arrives in New York. The tentative, beautifully understated relationship which develops between Walter and Mouna is the magic ingredient which disarms the audience completely.

McCarthy’s inspiration for the film came partly from a cultural trip organised by the US state department which took him to Oman and to Beirut. In the latter, he met with a collective of young writer and filmmakers who introduced him to the drum-based music which features so evocatively in the movie, and to the films of Hiam Abbass. “Someone showed me Satin Rouge which is this lovely film and from that moment on, I was a fan of hers. In fact I wrote the role for her.” The character of Walter was an idea that came out of a conversation about older filmmakers who become disillusioned with their work.. “We were talking about what happens when you lose that passion for your vocation, that thing that as a young person you were charged by.”

Perhaps The Visitor’s success comes partly because of its timing, released at a point where liberal America is finding its voice again after a period of being stunned into disillusioned silence by the bellicose war cries of its government. McCarthy recalls, “Looking back at 2004, 2005 and 2006 when I was trying to write, things were such a mess. There was such a feeling of alienation and frustration and contempt, misunderstanding and division. We were all asking questions at the time about who are we as individuals and as a country. I think that derailed me from writing. I thought, I don’t want to make movies right now, it feels inadequate. And on that level, I think there was something in the immigration angle that let me commit emotionally. It didn’t feel like I was burying my head in the sand with regard to what’s happening in the country.”

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