The Loved Ones

Brent turns down Lola for the end-of-year formal. Lola and her father abduct him, dress him for a private dance in their kitchen, and work through an evening of increasingly personal cruelty.

Sean Byrne made a genuine oddity: a torture film that is also a pitch-black comedy about adolescent rejection, with a pink-themed home-made prom staged in a suburban kitchen while a second, real dance happens elsewhere.

Robin McLeavy plays Lola as a giggling, needy monster and the father's devotion to her is the most disturbing thing in it.

It is extremely violent and genuinely funny, which is a hard combination, and it has a real emotional undercurrent about grief and loneliness running beneath the salt and the drill.

It won audience awards on the festival circuit and took years to get a release, which is the standard fate of films this hard to categorise.