“The Great Invisible,” Margaret Brown’s quietly infuriating documentary film about the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, includes depressing information that many would probably be happier not knowing.

Since the catastrophe, which began with an oil rig explosion that killed 11 workers and led to a discharge of millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, the company that operated the rig, BP, has cleaned up less than one-third of the spill, according to the film. More than four years later, Congress has yet to pass any safety legislation for the petroleum industry. Of the multibillion-dollar profits made by BP over a recent three-year period, the film says, less than a tenth of 1 percent was spent on safety. After a brief moratorium on offshore drilling, the ban was lifted, and there are now more rigs in the Gulf of Mexico than before the disaster.

The film, for which BP executives declined to be interviewed, is not a thunderous, finger-pointing exposé of corporate greed and mismanagement. Nor is it a dry, fact-filled history of the disaster or an analysis of the technology of oil drilling. The 92-minute movie also leaves it for others to explore the spill’s ecological and environmental impact. There are a few obligatory images of sea birds coated with oil and aerial shots of oil slicks destined for the Gulf Coast.

The principal focus is on the everyday people whose lives were disrupted. A similar emphasis on human beings informed Ms. Brown’s acclaimed 2008 documentary, “The Order of Myths,” an exploration of Mardi Gras culture in Mobile, Ala.