Two gentle British films playing at this month’s BAMcinemaFest explore what miracles may or may not occur when a disheveled male intruder, having taken refuge on private property, is discovered by the unsuspecting heroine. Bryan Forbes’s directorial debut Whistle Down the Wind is fifty years old and justifiably beloved, though little seen these days. The small independent film Stranger Things arrives in Brooklyn having won prizes at four recent festivals for its first-time feature writer-directors, Eleanor Burke and Ron Eyal.

“Only connect”—E.M. Forster’s recognition, expressed through Margaret Schlegel in Howards End, of the need for people to transcend class barriers—is the unspoken watchword of Stranger Things. Oona (Bridget Collins), an uremarkable, seemingly repressed young woman, travels to a seaside cottage near St. Leonards in East Sussex. It belonged to her mother, an arty eccentric, who has died, and Oona comes to sort out her belongings and sell up.

Rather than spend her first night at the decaying cottage, she stays with a neighbor, who blithely regales her with anecdotes that testify to the mother’s social awkwardness; Oona tapes their conversations, partly to preserve maternal memories, partly because she has ideas about drawing on her anthropology degree in some unspecified manner. While she’s away, a vagrant, Mani (Adeel Akhtar), climbs through a window and beds down, thinking the place unoccupied. He’s still there the following morning when Oona shows the cottage to a real estate agent. When, eventually, they meet, she strikes his face with a broom handle and bellows at him to leave.

Only connecting: Adeel Akhtar and Bridget Collins in 'Stranger Things.'

He drops his sketch pad as he flees, and Oona, remorseful, finds him on the road and returns it. She offers him the shed, her old playroom, to sleep in and a plate of cookies. Well-meaning but patronizing and naïve, she in unsettled when he asks her for money—she guiltily gives him a note—and especially by the jokey (but unfunny) marriage proposal he makes when departing. He heads into town, but comes back again that evening. Oona, flummoxed, heads out to the field behind the cottage to hyperventilate.

An uncertain intimacy, born of loneliness, develops between them. Oona tries to interview Mani about his itineracy at the cost of his ease, and, instead, we learn more about her being raised by her mother alone and her filial neglect. At one point, Oona talks to a self-involved friend on the phone, but we deduce that, like her mother, she is a solitary figure, unused to forging relationships. Mani may be less well-adjusted than Oona in socially normative terms, but he is comfortable enough with other street people. Among other skeletons in his closet, there’s the ailing tramp he abandoned on the beach before breaking into the cottage. This old man has been Mani’s protector in the past—stumbling along together, the two cut a Dickensian pair in a film little given to rhetoric—and it dawns on Mani that he doesn’t want to make the same mistake in relation to this parental figure that Oona made with her mother.

Although Stranger Things doesn’t carry much allegorical weight, Mani’s Middle Eastern features and complexion complicate Oona’s suspicion of him. If Kelly Reichardt’s revisionist Western Meek’s Cutoff is a post-9/ll film, then Stranger Things is, too, whether the filmmakers intended it to be so or not. Prejudice falls away. A gesture made by Oona to Mani at the end of the film, indicating how strongly she has connected, may strike some viewers as too contrived or implausibly wish-fulfilling, but the refusal of cynicism is refreshing.

Burke (who photographed the film) and Eyal directed Stranger Things in a crisp realist style, favoring extremely tight close-ups that get under the skin of characters who are at first unfathomable. The nuanced performances by Collins (a major talent) and Akhtar (hilarious as the inept jihadist in Four Lions) fully bear out the directors’ belief in an actor-driven cinema.

Whistle Down the Wind, which is being shown at BAM in a new 35mm print, was based on the novel by Mary Hayley Bell, the mother of Hayley Mills. Then at her adolescent peak, Mills is timelessly affecting as a farm girl, Kathy, who convinces herself, her younger siblings, Nan (Diane Holgate) and Charlie (Alan Barnes), and all the local kids that the wounded murderer, Blakey (Alan Bates), who’s on the run and hiding out in her father’s barn, is Jesus Christ. He is a descendant, of course, of Magwitch in Great Expectations, though only beneficent in that he teaches Kathy a life lesson.

Second coming: Alan Bates, Diane Holgate, and Hayley Mills in 'Whistle Down the Wind.'

In adapting the book for the screen, Keith Waterhouse and Ted Willis moved the setting from Sussex to Lancashire, “northernizing” it at the request of the producer, Richard Attenborough. This brought the film into the orbit of the primarily northern-based kitchen-sink realism movement—the British new wave—of the late ’50s and early ’60s. Dark satanic mills can be seen in a few shots of a film that doubles as a coming-of-age story—borne along as it is by Malcolm Arnold’s sprightly but poignant theme tune—and as a parable of the arrest of Jesus as a common criminal.

Forbes’s film stands apart, however, from Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, A Taste of Honey, A Kind of Loving (also written by Waterhouse-Willis and starring Bates), and This Sporting Life. Those are grim films about adult realities—the limitations of work and love, the pain caused by sex, death by conformity. While Whistle Down the Wind depicts the neighborhood adults as scolds and skeptics (the vicar is a narrow-minded humbug), its focus is on the strength of children’s faith and credulity, their belief in goodness—nothing is so moving as Kathy crying to Blakey, “I love you! I love you!” As an emissary from heaven, already crucified once, he stands in for the mother she has lost. To Charlie, whose kitten dies in his presence, he’s not Jesus, “just a fella.” Yet Charlie is Judas.

It’s to Bates’s credit that he doesn’t reveal how much the doomed Blakey has been touched by Kathy’s ardor; we sense that he has been “visited” as much as she has. It’s to Mills’s credit that she doesn’t disclose the extent of Kathy’s disillusion when Blakey is caught, but we know she has become wiser, and a little sadder. Try thinking of a recent children’s film this haunting, this tender, and you’ll find yourself whistling in the dark.

BAMcinématek is showing Stranger Things on Saturday, June 25, at 4.15 pm; and Whistle Down the Wind, on Sunday, June 26 at 1 pm. BAM Rose Cinemas, Peter Jay Sharp Building, 30 Lafayette Avenue, Fort Greene, Brooklyn. (718) 636-4100. BAM.org.

Tags: Alan Bates, BAM Rose Cinemas, BAMcinemaFest, British realism, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Bryan Forbes, Eleanor Burke, Hayley Mills, Ron Eyal, Stranger Things, Whistle Down the Wind