Sean Durkin’s new film feels as if it’s constantly alluding to something – on forms of repression, psychological conditioning, and how they function in society. It straddles genres, part drama, part thriller, as it recounts the memories of Martha (Elizabeth Olsen) after she escapes from an outback cult and attempts to readjust to life with her sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson).

There’s actually quite a delicate balance in Durkin’s film; the flashback sequences reveal enough about Martha’s experiences without detailing how she got there – at first she seems defensive before becoming brainwashed to the whole idea of ‘finding her place’ within the cult. The “Alpha Male” – played with uneasy balefulness by John Hawkes – seems to favour Martha over the others (surprising then that he doesn’t chase her after she escapes) and adds a menacing intensity to every scene between the pair. Maybe this film is really commenting on our hectic, atomised lifestyles – that if you step away from them and live in the rugged outback, detached from it all – it becomes almost impossible to fit back into consumer society. Martha rants at Lucy’s husband that it’s the ‘wrong way to live’, suggesting there are other ways and options (she says ‘we just exist’) – maybe it’s a simplistic view of it all, but is resonant in today’s acquisitive approach to life.