With this in mind, your humble writer sat down and watched Mute again. And then a third time. It was after these additional viewings that its themes began to resonate more clearly – specifically, the theme of parenthood, which we’d vaguely picked out at the time of our review but struggled to entirely nail down. Amid Jones’s dense, turning future-noir, it was a thread that initially felt difficult to discern, and only started to make sense once we thought more about the connection between Leo, the mute protagonist played by Alexander Skarsgard, and a much smaller character (in every sense) – Josie, the little girl played by twins Mia-Sophie Bastin and Lea-Marie Bastin.

From one perspective, Josie isn’t exactly integral to the plot, which largely concerns Leo’s search across the darker corners of future Berlin for his missing girlfriend, Naadirah (Seyneb Saleh). Before she vanished, Naadirah told Leo in so many words that she had an entire past that he didn’t know about. And sure enough, Leo’s amateur detective work brings him – and therefore us – into contact with some particularly sketchy characters – primarily a pair of AWOL military surgeons, ‘Cactus’ Bill (Paul Rudd) and ‘Donald’ Duck (Justin Theroux).

Clearly modelled on two similar characters in MASH (Donald is likely a reference to the original Hawkeye actor in the movie, Donald Sutherland), Cactus and Duck are initially the kinds of morally compromised yet charismatic people we often see in off-beat indie crime thrillers. They do mucky jobs like removing bullets from legs for gangsters, but appear to have a decent streak, too: Cactus is clearly protective of his daughter, Josie, while Duck has a day job that involves giving cybernetic limbs to children.

It’s only gradually that the true depths of their depravity are laid bare: Duck is a paedophile who can barely suppress his predatory tastes, while Cactus is a violent sociopath who killed his own estranged wife – the wife, it turns out, was Leo’s girlfrend Naadirah. To add insult to an already horrendous crime, Cactus doesn’t even treat Naadirah’s broken body with dignity – she’s left dumped next to an empty freezer, loosely covered in a sheet of grubby polythene.

With images as sharp as this rubbing up against scenes of flying cars and smart-aleck partying, it’s little wonder, perhaps, that Mute was regarded with a certain amount of shock by critics. Certainly, there was little in Moon or Source Code that hinted that Jones had such dark, uncompromising scenes in him. We were similarly left wondering, after our first viewing, what it was about Mute‘s story that so captivated Jones. Why had he spent all that time and effort realising this strange and disturbing story for the screen? What connects the theme of parenthood with Leo – a character with no wife, no child, and no obvious tie with Cactus and Duck other than Naadirah’s tragic death? And why was Duck written as a sexual predator, anyway?