THE CEMENT GARDEN (Directed by Andrew Birkin. Stars Andrew Robertson, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Alice Coulthard, Ned Birkin, Sinead Cusack)

Here is a family that could make the Addams’ look functional. In Andrew Birkin’s almost hallucinatory version of Ian McEwan’s searing first novel, four children hide their mother’s body in the cellar lest social services tear them apart. But it is the tensions between each other that threaten to overwhelm them, until they are temporarily resolved by incest and the creation of a new family power base.

It is a suburban Lord of the Flies. Insects buzz around in the long, hot summer as life and psyches decay. Their ugly cement house, stranded in the middle of a wasteland, graphically emphasises the children’s isolation and insularity. The camera dwells on the idiosyncratic, making a little piece of England seem the most alien of environments. The colours are bleached out, as if a kind of winter were creeping in despite the heatwave.

The Cement Garden does not have the feel of a British movie. It is European in the confidence of its otherworldly vision, and in the bold handling of sexuality. If anything, Birkin makes more of the incestuous sub-text than McEwan did. It pulses away from the earliest scenes, in a bout of tickling and a gamine headstand. At first it appears another example of adolescent self-obsession. Jack (Andrew Robertson) masturbates in front of mirrors and he appears to view his self-contained older sister Julie (Charlotte Gainsbourg) as another reflection of himself. When he looks vacantly out of a window he sees himself on the street, staring up at the window, where Julie sits.

But as the obsession moves towards fulfilment, it becomes both more sinister and more ordinary. It is hard to know what conclusions to draw from a climax that seems to suggest the family that lays together, stays together. And when you note that Andrew Birkin is directing his own niece (Gainsbourg) through this relationship, it takes on even more confusing and disturbing dimensions.

The Cement Garden works most potently as an uncompromising portrait of male adolescence. The ego, the naïveté and in particular Birkin’s steady, subtle exposure of the clumsy introversion of the first sexual self-discovery is almost too painful to watch.

Or perhaps, for some, too boring. The biggest problem with evoking alienation in the cinema is the danger of alienating the audience. The Cement Garden barely moves, hardly straying from the confines of a disintegrating house and neighbourhood. The images are repetitive, if increasingly disorientating. The story drifts by, with dreamy logic. “I feel as if I’ve been asleep for as long as I can remember,” says Jack, as the film at last draws to a close. And some members of the audience will undoubtedly agree: there was loud snoring coming from the back row the day I saw it.

But The Cement Garden has many compensations, stirring up the rawest memories of the most difficult period in most people’s youths. It is underlined by a macabre humour, and boasts some of the most natural performances by a young cast on film. This is a rare adaptation that actually succeeds in adding dimensions to its source novel, rather than subtracting them. Perhaps the perfect antidote to Christmas cheer.