The Nest moves a fractured family into a mansion built on a foundation of lies

► The Nest is in UK cinemas now.

The softly insidious strings of Richard Reed Parry’s score over the credits for The Nest suggest that we’re possibly in for a haunted house movie; a foreboding confirmed when, 15 minutes into the action, overambitious English-born commodities broker Rory O’Hara (Jude Law) not only moves his American family back to England but installs them in a grim, cavernous period manor house in the Home Counties that’s clearly way beyond their means – or their needs. But it’s not ghosts, ghouls or spirits that infest these glum corridors and sparsely furnished chambers. This, it transpires, is a house haunted by lies, and shadowed by the bitterness of a splintering marriage.

It’s been a decade since Sean Durkin’s only previous feature, Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011), in which a young woman (played by Elizabeth Olsen) escapes a manipulative cult to take refuge with her sister and brother-in-law. Though it’s a quite different story, there are foretastes there of The Nest – not least in the figure of the brother-in-law, another expat Englishman (played by Hugh Dancy) stuffed with vanities and buoyed by the status of living in a house way larger that he needs. In this, he anticipates Rory – with the crucial difference that the latter has all the flaunting pretensions but none of the funds to back them up. “I deserve this!” he screams at his wife Allison (Carrie Coon) when she accuses him of throwing their money away on self-gratifying ostentation. “I had a shitty childhood and I deserve this and a lot more!”

Law, drawing on much of the fragile, swaggering arrogance he displayed in The Talented Mr Ripley (1999) and Dom Hemingway (2013), makes Rory as much pitiable as despicable. But it’s Coon (best known for Gone Girl, 2014, the HBO dystopian series The Leftovers, 2014-17, and Season 3 of the TV Fargo, 2017) who holds the centre of the film, as awareness of her husband’s mendacity starts to sour her feelings for him. Not long after their arrival in England, the couple meet for dinner with Arthur Davis (Michael Culkin), Rory’s former boss, whose firm he’s now rejoined. Rory had told Allison that Davis had begged him to come back; Davis unwittingly reveals that the request came from Rory. Durkin’s camera holds on Coon in close-up as, with the subtlest of facial reactions, Allison registers the significance of the information. (If The Nest has a plot weakness, it’s the implication that in over a decade of marriage Allison, depicted as far from stupid, hasn’t previously sussed out quite what a bullshitter her husband is.)

Supplementing Reed Parry’s evocative score, a well-chosen soundtrack selection of period hits – Bronski Beat, Simply Red, Hüsker Dü, The Pretenders and the like – keeps us aware that this is set in the full flatulent glory of the Reagan-Thatcher boom years. Durkin, Canadian-born but brought up in England and the US, is well-placed to tease out the attitudinal subtleties that differentiate the two societies in the mid-80s and to derive quiet comedy from them. (When the couple are introduced by Mrs Davis at a polite get-together as “Mr and Mrs Rory O’Hara,” Allison adds firmly, “My name is Allison – that might have been confusing.”)

Social comedy, though, is no more than a light sprinkling of sugar on the film’s steadily darkening central substance as the O’Haras’ marriage slides irrevocably downwards into the swamp. The point of no return is reached when Allison’s beloved black horse Richmond, shipped over from the States, falls ill and has to be shot while she weeps in anguish. Arriving home to be told the news Rory expresses not a jot of sympathy but explodes in fury at the woman from whom they bought the animal. “Fuck! I wasted five grand on a faulty fucking horse!”

Collateral damage of the doomed relationship are the two children: teenage Samantha (Oona Roche), Allison’s daughter from a previous marriage, throwing up at druggy parties with her friends from the local comprehensive, and ten-year-old Ben (Charlie Shotwell), bullied and miserable at the posh private school Rory’s consigned him to.

Anyone expecting a narrative twist, an unlooked-for plot reversal, is fated to be disappointed; almost from the outset, and certainly from the family’s arrival in the sunless Surrey mausoleum, it’s all too evident where we’re headed. What counts is the fascination of the slow burn, the sense of awful inevitability that Rory’s increasingly desperate reassurances – “You have nothing to worry about” – only accentuate. Backed by two exceptional lead performances, and with Mátyás Erdély’s atmospheric cinematography abetting every downward lurch, The Nest holds us in its thrall right from the start.