Remember the sentimental, slushy Brit film ‘Love, Actually’ from a few years ago? Well, take away the mawkishness and manipulation of emotions and you’re left with a pretty similar structure to that of BIFF competition feature ‘The Man of No Return’.

Both movies deliver slices of life which gradually intertwine, revealing the tangled relationships between the characters. But for every cliché which Richard Curtis, director of the first film, tapped into, Russian director Katya Grokhovskaya has a taboo to explore or explode. From rent boys to the painfully constrained sexuality of a young wheelchair-bound girl, this film shies away from nothing.

At times, it paints a grim picture of life in modern-day Russian but it is totally compelling. The plot centres on the head of a military training camp, his wife and their son and two daughters. We’re introduced to aspects of each of their lives but nothing is quite what it initially seems.

One of the daughters is described by her mother to the other — a career girl having an affair with her boss — as having the perfect family life. “Everybody is happy,” says the matriarch.

In fact, the first daughter is trapped in a loveless, sexless marriage with a husband who pays young men to meet him in back street hotels.

The military boss starts out as tough and unforgiving but is a broken man, brokenhearted, by the end of the film.

The son is sleeping with a rich older woman for cash — played by the model Mila Jovovich’s mother Galina Iovovich — but is doing so to raise money to run away with his beautiful girlfriend, who has her own secrets to reveal.

The film takes its time to play out each person’s story and is all the better for that.

My only gripe would be that there are perhaps too many characters and too many strands to weave together in this ambitious movie.

We don’t get to see much of the career girl, for example, so a decision she takes towards the end of the film has less dramatic impact than it could. But it’s a small complaint.

The majority of the characters are fully realised and there are several really touching scenes, one in particular between the mother and her son, when he tells her he wants to leave their small, suburban town.

Although this is a dark, dark movie, there is light and beauty — and much love, actually — too.

Slices of beauty and love in a grim, dark movie