A detective investigates her father’s dying words; the name of a girl who has been missing for 9 years.

A burning home in the distance, a happy family sitting in a park, a dazed woman regaining consciousness, Hellmington tells you just what it needs to from the very beginning, with a succinct visual language that allows pieces of its narrative to be slotted in as these details begin to take on meaning. Written and directed by Justin Hewitt-Drakulic and Alex Lee Williams, the film follows Samantha ( Nicola Correia-Damude ), who in the months following the death of her daughter, finds herself at her father’s side on his deathbed when he shouts out a name that leads her on a journey through her past and through family revelations that make her question whether she truly knows any of the people in her life.

A classic murder mystery thriller in its structure, Hellmington succeeds in pacing its narrative to create just enough mystery and intrigue without getting too bogged down in convoluted side plots. With each new revelation comes a re-evaluation of the characters we think we know but the strong supporting cast with their distinct personalities and motivations maintain a sense of the character’s identity even as our perceptions of that character evolve. Samantha herself is played with a subdued bluntness that manages to possess a great vibrancy without resorting to the sort of cheeky nihilism that these downtrodden characters are often given to keep them from being exhausting to follow for an entire film. This is achieved by numerous physical cues to suggest what the character is feeling which are executed with subtlety but then highlighted by the camera work to ensure the audience picks up on what is being suggested.

This highly deliberate, at times conspicuous, sense of style and structure is pervasive here with a use of daunting and alienating composition and an editing style that leverages each cut to inform and build off the next, whether that’s by carrying through a sense of motion or by using an audio element as a jumping-off point for the next scene. The ability to do this in a way that makes sense is just as contingent upon the music being able to emotionally direct us through this visual landscape and here the soundtrack, supplied by the band Cults, facilitates this beautifully with a highly responsive landscape of synth textures that is tightly choreographed to the film’s flow and moves from an uncanny jubilance to insidious distortion while maintaining the feeling of the scene or by stopping or changing so abruptly that it serves as a way to suggest a transition to a new movement before the narrative gets there.

There are occasional rough patches where the mood changes are too abrupt or there’s an unnecessary attempt at comedy and it does feel towards the end that it’s rushing to adequately flesh out a plot thread that hadn’t received enough attention up to that point. Aside from the occasional misstep, however, Hellmington has all the essential elements of an engaging thriller with a strong sense of mood and a cast of characters that are enjoyable to pick apart to see if you can predict how that character will develop.