Kids, who’d have them? That’s the thought you might at first take away from this harrowing tale of claustrophobia and twisted perceptions. That and to be wary of lonely old doctors offering charity with a warm smile, a possessive urge and more than a hint of the colonial.

In 2007 Belgium was shocked by a horror-show news story of a mother who murdered her children. Skip forward five years, to Cannes 2012 where Émilie Dequenne received the Best Actress award in the Un Certain Regard category for her incredible portrayal of Murielle, loosely based on said mother. Another year later and, in a fittingly understated fashion, À perdre la raison finally arrives in a smattering of UK cinemas. Sadly, with a certain megalithic 3D jazzgasm flapping its way to box office hegemony, it’s looking likely to be relegated to unjust obscurity.

Joachim Lafosse’s narrative charts the relationship of French teacher Murielle (Dequenne) and Moroccan immigrant Mounir (Tahar Rahim) as they spiral from enraptured bliss to asphyxiating hatred. The major cause of their decline is Mounir’s live-in, surrogate father Dr André Pinget (Niels Arestrup). The ostensibly altruistic GP’s support of Mounir and his family becomes an oppressively Faustian bargain as the financial dependants become subjects of domestic control. Mounir’s life is made by Pinget but, as the first third of the film takes us on a whistle-stop tour of the first years of the marriage, we see how his independence is forfeit in return.

The consequences of this warped familial environment are brutal for Murielle, who understandably cannot cope with her mental illness and the demands of four young children. Lafosse’s achievement is the development of such sympathy for this young mother so that the tragedy that bookends and therefore hangs over the entirety of this film is rendered terrifyingly understandable.

The three central performances are exceptional, as they are required to be in a film as minimalistic as this. There’s a refreshingly laconic use of sound, in which sharp bursts of arresting strings develop into a stylish leitmotif. Obliquely framed and packed with close-ups, Lafosse drags his audience unwittingly and perhaps, given the bleak subject matter, unwillingly into an emotionally torturous world, masterfully hitting the nexus between physical and emotional claustrophobia.

In its final scenes Our Children amps up the Greek tragedy and chilled brutality to spine-contorting new heights. There are dissertations to be written on this film’s manipulation of space and closeness but on the basest human level the seven years of married hell portrayed will take but 111 minutes to have you crawling up the walls.