Cert 15 Stars 3

Irish actress Jessie Buckley has been building an impressive career with big performances in in small films since coming to national attention as the runner up in BBC’s 2008 TV talent show ‘I’d Do Anything’, and she delivers again with an intense and transcendent turn in this aggravatingly opaque art house horror.

As an unnamed young woman she stars alongside a blank faced Jesse Plemons as her boyfriend travelling on a dark snowy night to meet his parents at their remote rural home, played with unsettling and eccentric enthusiasm by Toni Collette and David Thewlis.

The small cast deserve full credit for fully embracing the jarring rhythm, time-skipping narrative, dark theatricality and surreal approach, which begins with the deliberately ambiguous title and goes on to include dance, animation and movies within movies as it explores regret, longing and memory.

Based on the 2016 novel by Iain Reid, it’s written, directed and produced by one-man film industry Charlie Kaufman, previously an Oscar nominee for his superior and more commercial scripts for Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Adaptation.