Florida 2018, an unnamed government facility, and the air is thick with tension. Heidi (Julia Roberts), a caseworker for PTSD sufferers, sits behind a desk straightening pens and brushing away non-existent dust. A fish tank is built into the wood-panelled wall and an Anglepoise lamp sits on a table just so. Outside, in a palm tree-lined courtyard, a pelican casually strolls by.

In Homecoming (from Friday, Amazon Prime Video), a conspiracy thriller from Mr Robot’s Sam Esmail, everything is a little bit … off. The thriller is named after a government programme in which newly discharged war veterans are “assisted” in adjusting to civilian life. Among Heidi’s clients is Walter (Stephan James), who is unfailingly polite but who, in his quieter moments, daydreams about jamming his head into the corner of his desk.

Dispensed in tantalising half-hour chunks, it’s based on Gimlet Media’s hit fiction podcast of the same name, and has been adapted for television by its original creators, Eli Horowitz and Micah Bloomberg. It has the stylised, vaguely sinister quality of a Hitchcock film – all browns and ochres, brutalist buildings and artfully disorientating shots down stairwells. It also provides the rather pleasing spectacle of Roberts, an Oscar-winning actor and star of some of the sappiest romances ever committed to celluloid, serenely pivoting to the small screen. Fifteen years ago, our Jules – then the highest-paid woman in Hollywood, who pocketed $25m for the egregious Mona Lisa Smile – wouldn’t have countenanced such a move, but nowadays television is where the magic happens. And so here she is entering a brave new world of smaller budgets and longer hours, all to sate our desire for binge-watching.

She isn’t the only one engaging in this kind of mid-career shift, of course. Women in particular have been following a similar trajectory from film into TV – among them Winona Ryder (Stranger Things), Nicole Kidman (Big Little Lies), Geena Davis (The Exorcist) and Drew Barrymore (Santa Clarita Diet) – where the writing is superior and there are meatier roles for the maturer woman.

Roberts is excellent here, all cautious eyes and exposed nerves neatly funnelled into a pencil skirt. A beautifully composed tracking shot in the opening episode sees her walking through the compound with its darkly elegant interiors while on the phone to her short-fused boss, Colin (Bobby Cannavale). There are strong echoes of the classic West Wing walk-and-talk shots, though here the focus is entirely on Heidi, a fish out of water marooned in a hyper-real Architectural Digest world.

Fast-forward four years to 2022 and we see Heidi, tired, dishevelled and saddled with a dodgy wig, waitressing in a diner. Plus, she claims that she’s forgotten the details of her former life. Why the sudden amnesia? Why is she living with her mother? And how come she chucked in her office job for a life of dirty dishes?

Don’t ask me. For all its starry names and glossy compositions, Homecoming is an old-fashioned mystery at heart, one that is designed to make us all go “Eh?” as the credits roll. Abject confusion has rarely felt so good.