It is fair to say that spending your time doodling ouroboroses and picking open your surgical scar probably indicates you are not in a fantastic frame of mind. These are coping mechanisms for Mia (Simone Ashley) after she wakes up, at the start of this capable psychological thriller, from a coma resulting from falling several storeys of an airport building. A safety net is luckily there to catch her – but she remains in mental freefall. Assaulted by stray fragments of memory, she is unable to say whether husband, Jake (Austin Stowell), who is currently in jail, was the one who pushed her over the parapet.
As Mia tries to piece together shattered body and mind, her family, led by solicitous brother Ajay (Suraj Sharma), try to persuade her to cut Jake loose. But she dithers, held back by guilt about how seriously she took his own unravelling, the spiralling paranoia that made him quit his job as a New York actuary and led them to start a new life in Los Angeles. When she finally visits him in jail, is Jake gaslighting her – intent on further manipulation – when he suggests that Ajay is gaslighting her for his own ends by pushing her to break up with him? Or she gaslighting herself by giving him the benefit of the doubt in the first place? This is a Mexican standoff of gaslighting.
Pulling this claustrophobic knot satisfyingly tight, director Jennifer E Montgomery occasionally snags a Vertigo-like sense of concertinaed time as she explores Mia and Jake’s troubled past. There’s a kind of mnemonic rapture in the recurring snapshot of her tumbling down the atrium in her tangerine dress, and with the circle motif omnipresent in her drawings and elsewhere, in the suggestiont that this cycle of abuse must be broken.
Lurching into the past, or into Mia’s fugue states, every other minute, This Tempting Madness is heavily plot-driven without exactly being scrupulously plotted. It sometimes loses its grip on Mia’s inner state, and what may be prompting a particular spinout at a given moment. Culminating in a jarringly rough ending, it doesn’t quite have an astute enough grasp of these queasy personalities for true Hitchcockian finesse (Ajay, especially, ends up underused). But Montgomery brings visual poise to a pleasingly potboilerish wallow in toxic co-dependency.
• This Tempting Madness is on digital platforms from 10 August.
