Kyle Rideout's Eadweard is a painstakingly beautiful portrait of Eadweard Muybridge (Michael Eklund); an early pioneer of photography and inadvertent grandfather of cinema. Fittingly, Tony Mirza's cinematography is exquisite and precise from the first frame to the last, but the film flies the flag for impeccable craft on all fronts: immaculately styled, inventively staged and carefully edited to move briskly through Rideout and co-writer Josh Epstein's focused and energetic script. For a biopic, it never feels like Wikipedia coverage of Muybridge's life and career, but instead attempts to draw you into his mind, his work and a moment in history where an eccentric man's obsessions left an indelible mark on the world.

Muybridge's life and temperament certainly hold plenty worth telling. The film paints Eadweard as an incessant, but endearing eccentric, apparently turned prematurely, and instantly, grey after a runaway stagecoach accident; a technical innovator who pushed both artistic and scientific boundaries, offending the morality of his day and allegedly inspiring Thomas Edison's (arguable) invention of the moving image along the way, and a visionary crippled by his obsessions. Then there's the matter of his passionate, but emotionally unfulfilled, marriage to Flora Muybridge (Sara Canning) and the love triangle that would see him become the last American to be acquitted of murder on grounds of justifiable homicide. It's a marvel that Rideout and Epstein's script covers it all without compromising in energy or clarity.

The film focuses on Muybridge's motion studies for the University of Pennsylvania, which produced 781 stop motion images of humans and animals in motion, and probably cost him his marriage. Driven by an obsession to understand the intricacies of even the simplest motions, Muybridge devised a revolutionary system of triggering multiple wet-plate cameras to photograph a subject in rapid sequence, resulting in a series of stop-motion images by which motion could be examined. Not one to settle for good enough, Muybridge soon insisted that all models be filmed in the nude, causing quite an uproar among his University benefactors, despite his relative conservancy in other spheres of life.

As played by Eklund, Eadweard is a man of curious physicality - his movements sharp and angular, his mercurial intensity seemingly wound into his bones. His eccentricities are not the result of a man seeking attention, but one simply living outside the social order the rest of us take for granted. His is a portrait of a decent, honorable man with tunnel-vision focus and blunt emotional limitations. Canning is luminous and haunting as Muybridge's passionate but neglected young wife. The tenderness and affection between them is palpable, as is the sense of great loss when we witness Eadweard so preoccupied with his obsession and blinded by jealousy that he is unable to reach her before she slips away. All in all, Eadweard is a lush, focused and lovingly crafted portrait of a man who felt the future calling and found himself rather out of place in his own time.