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There are moments of life-and-death crisis in which time simultaneously stops and stretches, becomes both immaterial and absolutely of the essence, and few spaces do more to blur it than a hospital — where lives end, begin and are drastically altered in seconds that pass like centuries. In her wrenching debut feature “Blind Spot,” Norwegian actress-turned-filmmaker Tuva Novotny nails that panicked, indefinably elastic form of time, making expert use of a potentially gimmicky technical device to do so. Shot in real time in a single, appropriately exhausting take, Novotny’s film follows a family plunged into a severe emotional hellscape when a seemingly well-adjusted teenage girl jumps from a fourth-storey window, forcing them (and us) to unpack an inexplicable tragedy with nary a spare moment to breathe.

Narratively speaking, what happens in “Blind Spot” might have filled a single arc of an “ER” episode back in the day. What makes the...