Michael Shannon, Douglas Ligon, Barlow Jacob

There's a death in two families — and more are coming, as a result. The families shared a father, but damn little else.

Pa Hayes was a violent drunkard whose misery was fuelled by a hate-filled wife.

He left his sons without even giving them names, so they go by Son, Boy and Kid.

Then he sobered up, found the Lord, became a devout Christian, met and married a wonderful new wife and fathered three further children, Cleaman, Mark and Stephen.

Eventually the double dad dies, his first family turn up at the funeral to make sure he is gone and, before long, a mini white-trash war is under way.

Jeff Nichols' powder-keg movie is close to Coen Brothers territory and particularly reminiscent of their recent No Country for Old Men, filled with little vignettes and striking locations in south Arkansas — like a run-down waterside with a busy highway just visible in the distance.

Loyalty to kin supercedes community or even morality, but there are those, as in No Country, attempting to hold the tide against chaos.

Son, Boy and Kid live lives caught between reckless and romantic, free and incarcerated at the same time, two living in a tent and a truck, and a house when Son's wife temporarily leaves.

But beneath the random, ramshackle ordinariness of their broken lives lie real values — there's a thin line, for example, between being free and being a bum. There's a pride in having a job, but some kind of loss, too. You're caught.

Nichols, who wrote one of those scripts with few wasted words as well as directing, demonstrates that revenge is complicated and anger has a way of going awry.

We spend most of the movie's relatively short time with the first trio of unnamed brothers, but our sympathies shift and ultimately fail to settle.

The atmosphere is as taut as a pylon and the final confrontation seems inevitable but, while relentlessly bleak, the violence is awkward and realistic rather than graphic.

The cast are virtual unknowns, and probably all the better for it, with Michael Shannon particularly superb as eldest son Son.

Adam Stone's cinematography, and some almost still camera work, produces images which will stay in y our head. For the right reasons.

Now showing at QFT.