Hallam Foe (18)

Jamie Bell plays the title character, an eccentric young loner with a predilection for face-paint and spying on people. In a twist on Hamlet, he suspects his father (Ciaran Hinds) and his foxy new bride (Claire Forlani) of murdering his mother, drowned in the lake of the family estate. Unable to prove foul play, he flees to Edinburgh, where he becomes a hotel porter by day and a rooftop prowler by night. The object of his nocturnal peeping is the hotel personnel manager Kate (Sophia Myles), whose resemblance to his late mother sparks an obsession. "I like creepy guys," she tells Hallam, which is just as well, really; she might not care to know that he's been training his binoculars on her bedroom window.

David Mackenzie, who directs from an adaptation of the Peter Jinks novel, is returning to the dark byways of alienation he patrolled in his superb Young Adam and misfiring Asylum. He understands the pleasures of simultaneous light and shade, and can find something sweet even in this potentially tragic tale of misplaced longing. Bell translates the athletic aspirant of Billy Elliot into this closed-off, somewhat feral character, a Peeping Tom who's not absolutely certain of what he's looking for. He matches up well with Sophia Myles, whose girl-next-door affability keeps hinting at something more melancholic and disquieting – you believe her line about creepy guys.

I also enjoyed Maurice Roeves's performance as a brooding (and very Scottish) kitchen porter who seems to have spent a lifetime refining his misanthropy to an essence.

Accomplished as it is, the film has trouble marrying the separate halves of the story, the mystery of the mother's death and the weird courtship Hallam is pursuing. While both are intriguing, they are never convincingly made to seem parts of a seamless whole. It hasn't the pulse of those malign energies that made Young Adam such a belter. But any movie with David Mackenzie's name on it is worth a look.