Sometimes you just believe it, don’t you? The distance between you and the screen, you and the characters, you and the story just collapses. You see no artifice. You don’t suspend your disbelief, willingly or otherwise, because it never comes into being.

So it was with Shane Meadows’ latest offering, The Virtues, co-written with Jack Thorne and starring Stephen Graham. It’s a truly formidable combination, as This Is England the film and subsequent television trilogy amply demonstrated (though Graham is probably more recognisable currently for his mesmerising performance as the suffering undercover officer John Corbett in Line of Duty).

In The Virtues, which divides clearly into three acts, our first sight of Graham as Joseph is a closeup of him staring out of a van window as his workmate prattles beside him. He looks – immediately, unreservedly, unmistakably – like a man already scoured out by life. He drags himself out of the van, into his unlovely flat in an unlovely block, picks up a package and starts walking. Day has turned to dusk and more by the time he reaches his destination; the neat, warm suburban house in which his clearly beloved son lives with Joseph’s ex, Debbie, and her new partner David. It is a farewell dinner – full of tenderness if not love among the adults, the line between the two delicately traced by Graham, Vauxhall Jermaine as David and Juliet Ellis as Debbie – before the new family depart for Australia. Joseph does his best to convey his love for his son without undermining the boy’s security or jeopardising the happiness this new start promises to bring him. It would move you to tears if it wasn’t so harrowing, and if the creeping feeling of dread conveyed by Graham’s virtually wordless conjuring of a man already perilously near an emotional precipice wasn’t putting any kind of catharsis on hold.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Unspoken pain infuses every scene, every gesture and expression ... Stephen Graham as Joseph. Photograph: Dean Rogers/Channel 4

Having strained every sinew and held it together at the house, the second act is Joseph’s unravelling. It’s a long, painfully realistic search for oblivion, set in a pub full of strangers, with every stage of his descent unforgivingly detailed. He drinks quietly until he’s loose enough to invite himself into someone else’s ground – with a round or two to smooth the way. From there we move into strained bonhomie, more rounds, more heavily lubricated temporary friendships, a layer of fake happiness stripped away with every pint, shot and – soon enough – noseful of coke. The desperation and aggression rise ever closer to the surface, until finally he is heaved out and sent home to come round alone on the floor the next day covered in vomit and piss.

Act three sees Joseph packing a bag and catching a ferry – after being forced to buy a ruinously expensive ticket by a jobsworth on the counter because his turn in the queue comes five minutes after cheap cut-off time, emblematic of all the ways the fates can conspire against a man – to return to his hometown, Belfast. He is preparing, we must assume, to face down the demons hinted at in the fragmentary flashbacks of his childhood that intermittently intrude upon him; abandoned children, a priest in the background, staircases that do not lead to heaven. Meadows has said that this is his first work since dealing with repressed memories of his own childhood sexual abuse, and we must infer that there will be no great lightening of Joseph’s or the viewers’ load over the next few weeks.

It’s a brutal, bruising brilliant hour. It has the same sense – though played in a very different key – that last year’s Patrick Melrose conveyed; of the desperate attempt by a suffering soul to escape by any means necessary, without him fully realising how or why, the experiences corroding him from within. Unspoken pain infuses every scene, every gesture and expression from Graham and in doing so lays the foundations, surely, to do justice to the suffering of victims everywhere. Whether the confrontation Joseph seems to have in his mind, as he sets out across the Irish Sea with four pounds in his pocket and a basilisk look in his eye, will deliver a more tangible form for him over the coming episodes, we will have to gird our loins and see. But The Virtues is already a triumph of art over life for Meadows. I hope it brings him peace, too.