Given both its title and the overlap in subject matter, a viewer could understandably be forgiven for taking a sidelong glance at A Taste of Whale and expecting an emotional companion piece to 2009’s The Cove. That film, helmed by Louie Psihoyos, found both the director and former Flipper trainer turned activist Richard O’Barry embedding with an elite team of eco-warriors and free divers as part of a covert mission to penetrate a tightly guarded fishing bay in Taiji, Japan, and expose the community’s annual slaughter of tens of thousands of dolphins. Edited like a heist flick, the nonfiction film was a highly subjective piece of advocacy cinema which rode a wave of triggered sentiment to all sorts of awards, including the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.

In somewhat similar fashion, A Taste of Whale, explores the large-scale killing of pilot whales — this time in the Faroe Islands, a self-governing country and part of the Kingdom of Denmark with about 52,000 residents. This movie’s aim, however, is different — its lens broader. Directed by Vincent Kelner, the even-keeled film affords subjects on both sides of the issue a respectful platform, and thus invites viewers to confront the brutal reality of modern-day humanity’s disconnection from so much of its food supply. The result is a thought-provoking and deeply ruminative work about the weight and value of old customs and traditions — what is worth holding onto, and what is perhaps outmoded and worth adapting, curbing, or even stopping.

Located about 320 kilometers northwest of Scotland and halfway between Norway and Iceland, the Faroe Islands is described by many as having the best of both worlds. Its citizens enjoy a high standard of living and can work and travel in EU countries, but don’t have to abide by any binding economic rules, and the country maintains autonomy over its own fishing waters.

For both food and industry, around 700 pilot whales are slaughtered each year in the Faroe Islands, many in seasonal “Grindadrap,” or Grinds — communal cullings which feel like they could serve as a backdrop for an Ari Aster movie. In the grand equation of the roughly 200 million land animals and seven billion fish killed daily for human consumption, that may not seem like a lot. But there are questions about the practice’s impact on both oceanic food chains and human health, as well as the ethicalness of its sustainability in the modern world.

On one side of the issue are people like Lamya Essemlali, the president of Sea Shepherd, a nonprofit marine conversation activism group working to disrupt the Grind. On the other side are native Faroese like Jens Rasmussen, a teacher who butchers his own meat and argues, in measured tones, that knee-jerk opposition to something like the Grind is a reflection of the fact that so many people today live far away, both physically and psychologically, from where their food comes from. Though his colored tattoo that recreates the bloody water of cove killings would to some indicate otherwise, fisherman Torik Rouah asserts the Grind is not for pleasure or observed as some rite of passage. Rather, it is just a part of Faroese life.

If A Taste of Whale seems built for divisiveness, the movie’s considerable surprise and delight lies jointly in how its subjects treat one another, as well as the bird’s-eye view of the core conflict it takes. Essemlali talks about explaining her opposition to the Faroese using the broader framework of a vegan diet. A local activist endorses leaving emotional appeals aside and putting all the focus on the issue of food contamination (pilot whales typically possess incredible amounts of mercury, owing to diets compromised by human pollution). Rasmussen, meanwhile, reflects on the merit of several points raised by activists, and at one-point races out to tow in an imperiled Sea Shepherd ship after its motor dies, leaving it stranded and susceptible to dangerous ocean currents.

Some viewers, understandably, will find it tough to watch children playing on pilot whale corpses, and taking part in carving them up after a Grind in Hvannasund that fells 135 whales, providing around 30 kilograms of meat per person, or enough to last six to eight months. But the film, in refusing to peddle easy answers, is attempting to show the big-picture cost of an eroded connection between humankind and mother nature, a double standard which one subject aptly describes as, “I cannot stand to see things dying, but I want to eat things that are dead.”

Director Kelner, also working as his own also cinematographer, crafts a movie which courses with a natural curiosity, complemented by a nice score from Merryn Jean. At 85 minutes, A Taste of Whale is lean and smartly paced, devoid of scenes that dawdle or take viewers too far away from its main players (though actress and animal rights activist Pamela Anderson pops up at a press conference, not quite ready to answer pointed questions from journalists). It certainly helps that Kelner has an eye for artful framing as well as small but telling moments. The latter is captured in a sequence in which a local man, in conversation with a Sea Shepherd volunteer, asks as a question and then simply repeats, “You are just tourists,” revealing swallowed hostility in a manner much more evocative and interesting than a nakedly direct confrontation.

In the end, A Taste of Whale takes a complex issue and honors its thorny complications and contradictions rather than shave them down. Providing a glimpse of some sliver of generational attitudinal shift, Rasmussen’s teenage sons talk about having a take-it-or-leave-it attitude toward whale meat (“It tastes like a cow that’s been soaked in the sea,” says one with a shrug), even as Rasmussen himself says he’ll continue to eat it despite a test indicating he has 500 percent the amount of mercury in his body associated with possible health effects. Absorbing and thought-provoking, Kelner’s film asks viewers to ponder the freedoms of personal choice, and whether those decisions have — or should have — some component of responsibility to society beyond one’s own immediate community.