Hallam Foe by Paul Bullock

As far as film pitches go ‘alienated teenager develops sexual obsession on a woman who looks like his dead mother’ is hardly up there with Gone With The Wind. But that's exactly the plot of Hallam Foe, Young Adam director David Mackenzie's hymn to confused youth. Coming on like Vertigo as directed by a young Ian McEwan, with a dash of JD Salinger thrown in for good measure, it blends black humour, romantic comedy and coming of age drama to form a unique and haunting film which is both beautifully charming and hideously disturbing.

What it is not, however, is salacious and exploitative. The eponymous Hallam (Jamie Bell) is the kind of character you’d expect to see cluttering the roster of freaks in the latest American high-school comedy. He’s moody, insular and, with his scraggly hair and longing eyes, looks a bit of a gothic nut case. In fact, with his penchant for writing down observations on the world in his voluminous diaries, he’s not a million miles away from being a Scottish, low-tech version of Wes Bentley’s unhinged, video camera-obsessed character from American Beauty.

For Mackenzie, however, Hallam is a hero, one fighting against the torments of grief and maturation. A seven-year-old boy stuck inside the body of a seventeen-year-old teenager, he has coped with his mother’s death (and the questions in his own mind about whether it was really a case of suicide) by regressing into a sort of childhood. He’s set up a bedroom in his elaborate treehouse, where he stores pictures of and postcards from his deceased parent. He also keeps in there an old dress of hers and various items from her jewellery and make-up boxes, using them to dress himself up in tribal garb, almost like he’s playing a game of Cowboys and Indians.

This would all be quite sweet really if he didn't also use the treehouse as a base from which to indulge his darker instincts. Hallam may act like a child, but with the hormones of a seventeen-year-old battering his loins day in day out, he‘s got some pretty serious sexual and criminal preoccupations too. He works out how to pick locks, tries to strangle (and have sex with) his detested stepmother (Claire Forlani) and develops cat-like climbing skills on roof-tops, something which proves useful when, having run away to Edinburgh, he meets and begins spying on Kate (Sophia Myles), a hotel manager with an uncanny resemblance to his mother.

Gently pursuing her like a dog looking for its dead master, Hallam begins to find a sense of belonging in the Scottish capital, and Mackenzie echoes the character’s serenity in his ghostly shooting style. Picturesque but gothic; enchanting yet frightening, Edinburgh looks like something from a David Lynch movie, with the velvet bluey-greys of the evening sky contrasting strikingly with the murky burnt oranges of the streetlights, to create a sort of dark, secret playground across which Hallam obsessively watches his idealised love.

Except he gradually realises that she’s not so perfect after all. Although composed and elegant to outside eyes, Kate is really just a normal person shambling her way through the world, and Myles, revelling at being given one of the most interesting female characters of the year, nails her noble vulnerability (as well as a perfect Scottish accent). Ewan Bremner also excels in a minor role as a helpful concierge, but this is really Jamie Bell’s film. In a stunning turn, he makes Hallam at once a thoroughly repulsive and entirely relatable character, one who seems like just another confused kid, rather than a dirty pervert.

And that’s the charm of the film as a whole. Strange and enchanting; repulsive and endearing, it’s as good a rites of passage story as Stand By Me and certainly much, much more than its bizarre and seemingly exploitative set-up.