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There’s the all-consuming love of a husband and wife for each other and a parent for a child.

There’s the wild, romantic love that lures people to the sea and all too often leads them to what Henry James called “the tideless deep.”

And perhaps most mystical of all, there’s the love of suffering man for God that may be beyond the understanding of even God himself.

They’re bound up in a spare, moving narrative – from the mind of writer-director Jordan Bayne -- about a woman dying young and her parents, an estranged couple who reunite to witness her all-too-brief spring.

“It’s a very beautiful, mature love story,” Leo says.

The actress – who attended Purchase College and makes her home in Stone Ridge – has been fearless in bringing beautiful, mature characters to the screen, women whose prettiness has been worn down by struggle and calcified by the toughness they’ve had to assume. In “Frozen River” (2008), for which she received an Oscar nomination as Best Actress, Leo stunned critics with her portrayal of a single mom determined to maintain a sense of familial normalcy in an unraveling society. In “The Fighter” (2010), for which she won the Best Supporting Actress award earlier this year, that mother love took on a ruthless edge.

In “Sea,” Leo peels back the edge to expose the raw wound of a woman, Sara, so in tune with her daughter, Angelina (Kelly Hutchinson), and her pain that she is willing – in the view of her horrified husband, Sonny (Peter Gerety) – to defy God and natural law to contemplate ending it.

“The question is raised, What if there were greater and greater pain, with no hope, no dreams?” Leo says. “Like a baby needs to be born into the world, this is how we need to go out, with love and understanding.”

Ultimately, however, “Sea” is not a short about the right to die or even why God permits suffering – though the film touches on these themes. It’s about how people rediscover love through tragedy.

“The couple is estranged as the film opens, although there is an adoring father-daughter relationship,” Leo says. “He can barely face (her illness).”

In bringing their daughter through the long twilight, Sara and Sonny realize that what they are now is what they once meant to each other.