Might one detect a note of masculine crisis in the films of this year’s programme? Elegy and The Kreutzer Sonata delineate destructive erotic obsession, while A Complete History of My Sexual Failures laments emotional misconnection and Faintheart demands a very late graduation from boyhood. (Even WALL•E sees its male robot intimidated by a more efficient female model.)

Dummy, the distinctive and accomplished feature debut by Matthew Thompson, dips into childhood and adolescence to locate the sources of its male characters’ future issues. Danny (Aaron Johnson) escapes his claustrophobic home life with his depressive mother Elsa and odd little brother Jack by immersing himself in drugs, girls, and repetitive beats. But when Elsa (Therese Bradley) is permanently indisposed, Danny must step up to take care of Jack (Thomas Grant), an introspective little soul who misses his mother badly and is beginning to find some very peculiar solutions to his loneliness. Dummy’s odd psychosexual climate and upfront appreciation of the pleasures of transgression recall the work of David Mackenzie, particularly Hallam Foe (EIFF 2007); but as Jack chooses between a real-world bond with his brother and a ghoulish refusal to accept Mummy’s passing, Dummy might also be considered a projection of what might have happened if Norman Bates had had an older brother to take care of him ...

With astute visual ideas as well as sensitive performances, and lush, velvety cinematography by David Langan, this quirky mood piece is in a British gothic tradition that draws on the sensually-textured domestic nightmares of Nicolas Roeg’s work, as well as Hitchcock’s psychosexual investigations and Mackenzie’s darkly comic accounts of fractured intimacy – while the sinister sidekick of the title links the film to such boy-meets-doll oddities as Dead of Night and Lars and the Real Girl.