“Your voice,” says an elderly man (Burt Young) to Amanda Plummer’s Abigail Harm. “I don’t like your voice.”

It seems like a wink to Plummer’s presence; her squeaky rasp of a voice is one of the most distinctive anywhere. Director Lee Isaac Chung’s brief fable rests entirely on her shoulders, and such appeal as it has is entirely due to her.

Abigail is one of the urban lonely, a solitary woman who reads to invalids during the day. The opening scene has Plummer doing a marvelous reading of the scene from “Alice in Wonderland” in which Lewis Carroll’s heroine encounters a fawn.

That moment underlines the premise, in which Abigail is visited by a sort of spirit (Will Patton, who also does the overwritten narration), and he promises her a companion. Abigail must steal the robe of a beautiful young man (Tetsuo Kuramochi) when he bathes, and as long as she keeps it, he must remain with her.

The tone teeters between delicate and affected, and there’s only so much flitting around and soulful stares a movie can sustain before an audience starts wanting something more earthbound. But Plummer’s once-fey mannerisms have lessened with time, and she makes Abigail’s yearning the one tangible thing in this self-consciously wispy tale.