Diving into the mind of a tortured writer may not be new terrain, but rarely is the subject matter taken through the lens of a middle-aged housewife—and rarely is this type of narrative spun with such audacious, gripping intensity. Ana Urushadze’s astoundingly assured feature debut centers on a Georgian author, who also happens to be a mother, Manana (played with an unforgettable intensity by Nata Murvanidze). In the process of writing her novel, she has grown distant from her family and is eventually forced to choose between them and her work. She decides to pursue the world she’s woven in her head, but soon finds that fact and fiction are increasingly difficult to distinguish.

At times eerily surrealist and at others darkly comic, Scary Mother is a haunting and subversive portrait of contained creativity trying to break free—and the consequences of what happens when it does.