Dir: Peter Hedges. Starring: Julia Roberts, Lucas Hedges, Courtney B Vance, Kathryn Newton, Rachel Bay Jones. Cert 15, 103 mins

Ben Is Back sounds from its title as if it is going to be a goofy comedy or an exploitation picture, perhaps about the return of a slasher. In fact, this is a very dark family melodrama. The horror here is America’s ongoing opioid epidemic. Julia Roberts gives one of her strongest and most moving performances as a mother who goes to extreme lengths to protect her recovering drug addict son. The film, which takes place over the course of a single day, covers similar territory to Felix van Groeningen’s recent Beautiful Boy, but in a more intense and telescoped way.

It’s Christmas. Holly Burns (Julia Roberts), her husband Neal (Courtney B Vance) and their children are preparing for the festivities. The film begins in deceptively gentle fashion with Christmas carol singing in church and children dressed up in nativity costumes. Then, as Holly drives the children home on a snowy afternoon, a figure appears as if from nowhere in the middle of the road. This is 19-year-old Ben Burns (played by Lucas Hedges, the director’s son). He is a pale, ghostly figure. Ben is home for Christmas, claiming that he has been given permission to come out of rehab.

The filmmakers capture the extreme ambivalence the rest of the family feels about Ben’s unexpected arrival. His mum is delighted to see him and deludes herself that he “has got the sparkle back” in his eyes and has put on weight after 77 days without drugs. His sister Ivy is far more wary and his stepfather Neal is openly hostile. Everyone knows that he shouldn’t really be there.

Ben Is Back is cleverly scripted. At the moments you expect the storytelling to become slushy and lachrymose, it will turn very harsh indeed. Writer-director Peter Hedges uses conventions from the family-in-peril drama. Tension mounts as we wait either for Ben to do damage to himself or to wreak more havoc on the lives of those closest to him.

The 10 best neo-noir films Show all 10 1 /10 The 10 best neo-noir films The 10 best neo-noir films 10. Point Blank (John Boorman, 1967) For many, the starting point for neo-noir, although it passed under the radar in 1967. From Donald Westlake’s novel, noir veteran Lee Marvin is relentless as the criminal seeking revenge after being left for dead by his wife and best friend. Taut, uber cool, and full of noiresque flourishes (the whole story may well be Marvin’s dying dream), Point Blank never wastes a second. It introduced a new level of violence in cinema and laid the foundations for everything that was to come. The 10 best neo-noir films 9. Brick (Rian Johnson, 2006) The key components of film noir are audaciously relocated from the city’s mean streets to an American high school where the kids speak as if they are in a Dashiell Hammett novel. A teenager investigates the death of his former girlfriend in this highly original indie homage to the classic noir era. The 10 best neo-noir films 8. Body Heat (Lawrence Kasdan, 1981) The storyline of this Florida set thriller so resembled classic noir that its makers must have feared a plagiarism suite, but it works thanks to Kasdan’s assured direction and the last third of the film when the plot heads in a different direction. William Hurt is the dim-witted sap hoodwinked by an incendiary Kathleen Turner into murdering her husband. The verbal sparring between the two leads comes across as an amalgam of the sexual repartee of Double Indemnity and The Big Sleep in a film that has grown in stature over the years. The 10 best neo-noir films 7. Blood Simple (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1984) The Coen brothers debut film is a dazzling, darkly comic delight choc-full of the hallmarks of the brothers’ subsequent career. A venal private detective is hired by a cuckolded husband to murder his unfaithful wife and her lover. Complications ensue when the detective decides to deviate from the plot and murder the husband instead, resulting in a series of misunderstandings that leads to the blood soaked, twist filled denouement. The 10 best neo-noir films 6. Night Moves (Arthur Penn, 1975) Los Angeles private detective Harry Moseby’s marriage is on the rocks and he’s making a living on low rent divorce cases. So Moseby (Gene Hackman) jumps at the chance to high tail it to Florida to bring back a missing nymphet to her obnoxious mother. It all goes wrong from there, as in a common theme in 1970s noir, Moseby’s good intentions only serve to exacerbate an already fraught situation in this confused, perplexing example of post Watergate paranoia scripted by Scottish screenwriter Alan Sharp. The 10 best neo-noir films 5. The Late Show (Robert Benton, 1977) Art Carney excels as ageing private eye Ira Wells who investigates the death of his ex-partner with the help of kooky Lily Tomlin. Ira has a bad leg, an ulcer and a hearing aid, but still clings to his old world sensibilities. Ira doesn’t like to talk much, but that doesn’t matter as Tomlin’s character never stops. But the mutual attraction that develops between the two drives a warm, affectionate, witty love letter to 1940s’ noir. The 10 best neo-noir films 4. The Grifters (Stephen Frears, 1990) Assured, knowing direction from Englishman abroad Frears and career defining performances from John Cusack, Annette Bening and Anjelica Huston elevate this adaption of Jim Thompson’s pulp novel about a trio of con artists and their destructive relationship to near classic status. Frears cleverly retained much of Thompson’s hard-boiled dialogue and by using authentic noir locations and costumes produced a movie that personifies the spirit of classic noir. The 10 best neo-noir films 3. The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973) Purists were outraged at Hollywood maverick Altman’s irreverent updating of the 1953 novel. The great iconoclast Altman’s signature tropes are present and correct, from the overlapping dialogue to the incessantly wandering camera. One critic, missing the point entirely, complained (albeit humorously) that any resemblance to the Chandler novel was not only coincidental but probably libellous. The Long Goodbye was scripted by Leigh Brackett, maintaining continuity with both Chandler and classic era noir as she had co-written Howard Hawks’ version of The Big Sleep almost thirty years before. Elliott Gould’s dishevelled, mumbling Marlowe stumbles around modern day LA trying to unravel Chandler’s serpentine plot as if he had just woken from a twenty year slumber. However, Altman doesn’t try too hard to make sense of it all, famously stating that the biggest mystery in the film was just what had happened to Marlowe’s missing cat. The 10 best neo-noir films 2. LA Confidential (Curtis Hanson, 1997) Hanson proved that there is no such beast as an unfilmable novel with his masterful adaption of James Ellroy’s convoluted, labyrinthine original about three contrasting police offers who unite to investigate corruption and murder in the LAPD. Hugely compelling and wonderfully atmospheric, a game-changer in every sense and nominated for nine Oscars, winning just two in the year of Titanic. The acting, direction, script, editing and cinematography are uniformly brilliant in a film that defines the term modern classic. The 10 best neo-noir films 1. Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974) As great as LA Confidential is, it has to bow to Chinatown; one of the greatest, most stylish films ever made. Polanski drew on real life events (the bringing of water to Los Angeles through widespread corruption) to weave a sinuously intoxicating retro-noir that has never been bettered. Jack Nicholson’s suave, urbane private detective Jake Gittes exudes confidence and competence as he investigates a seemingly straightforward adultery case that spirals into a vast conspiracy involving corporate corruption, incest and murder. In reality, Gittes is just as lost as Elliott Gould’s Marlowe in The Long Goodbye. As heinous businessman Noah Cross tells Gittes, “You may think you know what you’re dealing with, but, believe me, you don’t.” Only the final tragic scene takes place in Chinatown and ultimately Chinatown itself is just a state of mind, a metaphor for the nefarious inner workings of a Los Angeles on the cusp of becoming the monstrous deity of lore. Graeme Ross

Perspectives on Ben are shifting all the time. He is charming, sensitive and very good at entertaining his younger half-siblings but he is also a malevolent, deceitful and very destructive presence. The other family members loathe him as much as they love him and they blame him as much as they pity him. He has continually let them down before. They expect him to do so again. They warn him it’s not in his best interests to be at home. There are “too many triggers” that might make him relapse. His stepfather, who has remortgaged the house to pay for his rehab, points out that if Ben were black, he’d “be in jail by now”. Race isn’t a major theme of the film, but the stepfather, who is black himself, can’t help but notice the double standards in a society in which young, white, middle-class addicts with wealthy parents keep on getting second chances. He is jealous, too, of the way that Ben steals away his wife’s attention.

Lucas Hedges (fresh from playing the tormented gay Christian adolescent in Boy Erased) brings a double-edged quality to his role as the recovering addict. He is a consummate con artist and liar whose actions have ruined or cost the lives of others. From scene to scene, it is impossible to tell when he is being sincere and when he is exploiting his family’s credulity. At the same time, he really is a victim. His addiction began when the friendly local doctor, now suffering from dementia, prescribed him what he claimed were harmless painkillers to clear up a sports injury. Ben became hooked – and it wasn’t his fault.

The film could easily have become a terrible dirge with the long-suffering parent giving in to self-pity as her son heads yet again towards the reefs. Instead, Roberts plays Holly as a fighter who redoubles her efforts every time Ben strays and who never dwells on the past. She simply won’t give up. “You’re trying too hard,” she is told. “That’s what I do,” she replies.

The ironies mount as Ben rages against his own mother for being stupid enough to believe what he tells her. He tries to be honest about his own duplicity but can’t always manage it. The filmmakers don’t gloss over the degradation and humiliation he endures. Whenever he is off screen for a few minutes, you fear that the next time you see him will be upside down with a needle in his arm.

For all its candour about the squalor of addiction and rehab, the film has some very contrived moments. Many involve the pet dog, Ponce, a shaggy little mongrel whose wellbeing matters as much to the Burns family as that of Ben himself. There are also heavy-handed Dickensian-like moments in which Holly will encounter vagrants and drug addicts and remember what they used to be like as doe-eyed little children.

The film’s producer, Nina Jacobson, also oversaw the Diary of a Wimpy Kid film series. Those were cheery, child-friendly movies about a family not so far removed from the one portrayed here. That is the point. Thanks to the opioid epidemic, movies about addiction are changing. Instead of films like Christiane F and The Man with the Golden Arm in which the protagonists are on the margins of society, we get such stories now set in the heart of middle-class suburbia.