“The Peasant Wedding” by Pieter Bruegel (photo: wikimedia.com)

Quick Netflix queue check: Is Museum Hours on your list? (trailer) If you put it there because you’re looking for an alternative to the deafening noise and frantic pace of action movies, you have succeeded. This 2012 drama was directed by Jem Cohen, the award-winning creator of numerous films about punk rock musicians, including Patti Smith. I haven’t seen those documentaries, but I’m guessing the quiet and snail’s pace of Museum Hours is a significant departure that takes the meaning of “art house film” literally.

Not overloaded with plot, the film includes lots of footage of paintings and sculpture and people looking at paintings and sculpture, a 15?-minute art appreciation monologue on the work of Pieter Bruegel, the point of which was that, in the panoply of people he scatters across his canvases, he doesn’t direct the eye to any single place. You can pick your own center. Each person portrayed is potentially equally important, regardless of the putative “subject” of the work.

That seems to be the Cohen’s point, too. That the two characters—a woman visiting Vienna to attend her comatose cousin—and a museum guard she meets by happenstance, are two random people and subjects as worthy of exploration as anyone else. That’s my guess, anyway.

Only three real speaking parts, all performed superbly: the guard, the out-of-towner, the museum lecturer. Not the comatose cousin. Much of the movie was filmed in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum. New York Times reviewer A.O. Scott gave it 5 stars and called it “quietly amazing, sneakily sublime.” Rotten Tomatoes called it “a mesmerizing tale.” Mesmerized, I fell asleep (briefly). Critics rating 94% — Audience: 59%. Like visiting an art museum without leaving home.