When the title character shows up early in “Ben Is Back” — just before Christmas, at his family’s big house in a suburban town north of New York City — the mood tilts from domestic drama toward domestic horror. Even after the menacing, hooded figure skulking around near the driveway is recognized as a son and brother (played by Lucas Hedges), the queasy feeling of terror doesn’t quite abate. Ben, unexpectedly home from rehab, scares almost everyone.

The rest of “Ben Is Back,” written and directed by Peter Hedges (father of Lucas), sustains and intensifies that clammy, anxious feeling. The suspense is generated by a deceptively simple question, one that haunts most stories of addiction: Will Ben use again? He has sworn that he won’t, and part of him doesn’t want to, but the other part has made him a liar, and worse, many times before. The questions his behavior creates for the people who love him are equally excruciating. Can they trust him? Should they believe him? How much more damage will he do, to them and to himself?

[Peter and Lucas Hedges never meant to make a movie together.]

A challenge in a movie like this — for its makers as well as its audience — is that there are few original or satisfying answers to any of those. One of the cruelties of addiction is the way it strips away individuality, making all addicts’ stories the same. Ben’s way of being in the world, as he swings from anger to panic to heartfelt promise-making to abject remorse, looks like a familiar performance. His disease is acting through him, as if he were possessed by a demon that is also his double.

Lucas Hedges, like Timothée Chalamet in “Beautiful Boy,” the season’s other alliteratively titled tale of a young man fighting a drug habit, deftly captures the nuances of this condition. He is entirely credible as an almost-grown man whose credibility has virtually collapsed, who is in a constant state of war with himself.