When Billy hikes back to the car with his three older fishing buddies, he summarizes their weekend in a cell phone call: "We found a body. I caught the most amazing fish, though."

		'Jindabyne' Starring: Gabriel Byrne, Laura Linney Director: Ray Lawrence Rating: R for disturbing images, language and some nudity Web site

And that is the problem for the foursome in "Jindabyne," opening Friday at the Regent Square Theater. They did find a body and they did have an amazing weekend of fishing -- with the corpse of a 19-year-old woman tethered nearby, so she wouldn't drift down to the rapids or ruin their trip.

They didn't kill the woman, just found her. She was dead, nothing they could do, they reasoned. But when the men finally contact the police and word leaks out about their actions, not everyone sees it their way.

"We don't step over bodies to enjoy our leisure activities," an officer tells the men in Jindabyne in New South Wales, Australia. "I'm ashamed of you. The whole town's ashamed of you."

Their action serves to split open barely closed wounds, to expose resentments, disappointments and doubts, and to underscore the divide between men and women and whites and Aboriginal people. Any uneasy peace that existed is fractured. It's as if someone drove a metal stake into a frozen lake and sent spider cracks radiating from the center.

The men's decision puts the marriage of one couple -- Claire (Laura Linney) and Stewart (Gabriel Byrne) -- in jeopardy, and adds to the stress of another pair (a dynamic Deborra-lee Furness as Jude and John Howard as Carl) who are raising their troubled and motherless granddaughter.

While the men are off fishing, Jude loses patience with the other women in her circle. "You're young. You're healthy. Your family's still in one piece. People die in the wrong order. That's pretty much when it all turns to [expletive]," she says.

Jude doesn't know it but she could be talking about the family soon to learn that a 19-year-old named Susan was killed and dumped in the water.

"Jindabyne" is based on a Raymond Carver story called "So Much Water So Close to Home," which placed the discovery of the corpse at the Naches River in the Pacific Northwest. This same story found its way into Robert Altman's mosaic in "Short Cuts."

Now, director Ray Lawrence and writer Beatrix Christian not only relocated the story to Australia but opened it up and recast it as a ghost story. Everyone is haunted by something, whether it's the death or birth of a loved one and recriminations all around.

Lawrence, whose 2001 movie "Lantana" was named for a tropical shrub with beautiful, exotic blooms concealing a thorny undergrowth, goes under the water or into the distance to create a sense of anxiety or voyeurism, real or imagined since the killer is still at large.

Byrne and Linney go at it here, emotionally and physically, as they unleash and attempt to exorcise the ghosts of their marriage. "Jindabyne" is about journeys, of spirits, friendships and families.

As Claire says, "This is about all of us. Who are we?"