They fuck you up, your mum and dad: it’s become a truism of modern culture, although it’s a bit of a leap from Philip Larkin to the likes of Fred and Rosemary West or Josef Fritzl, and from notions of unintentional psychological damage to actual bodily harm and extreme sexual abuse. Makers of horror films, though, have usually treated the theme quite literally, delighting in creating dysfunctional families of cannibals, murderers and perverts whose offspring are indeed unlikely to turn out well. But, then, of course, film-makers are savvy enough to point out that the bloody antics of such depraved screen clans are, in fact, simply a metaphor for the psychological harm inflicted by the bourgeois nuclear family, and so on and so forth. Which nicely circular state of affairs is surely the jumping off point for Mum & Dad, a surprisingly good new British entry in the genre.

In this case, the murderous family in question dwell in a dilapidated house at the end of a Heathrow airport runway, living off the contents of supposedly ‘lost’ luggage and using their ‘children’ to entice unwary victims to their home, where Mum tortures them for a while before Dad rapes, murders and chops ‘em up (indulging in a bit of Portnoy-ish fun with their livers, for good measure). Their latest victim is Lena, a lonely Polish airport worker, far from home and seemingly easy prey; ‘adopted’ by the family and thrown into a perverse and dangerous world, in which sibling rivalry really is a matter of survival, she turns out to be tougher than she looks – but can she survive Dad’s amorous attentions once Mum has tired of ‘playing with’ her?

It’s perhaps an overfamiliar story whose tripartite narrative structure – the entrapment and confinement of an innocent; protracted torture at the hands of the baddies; an eventual, cathartically violent escape ¬– is as accomplished, and, one might add, as predictable, as a classical sonata in its rolling out of exposition, development and resolution. As well as possessing a sure grasp of form and technique, the film also succeeds in evoking the bleak and lonely spaces of its Heathrow flightpath setting, a world into which one can imagine people (and, indeed, their luggage) disappearing all too easily. The actors – with the exception of Dido Miles’s Mum, who strikes a discordant and overly theatrical note – do a fine job with the material they’re given, particularly Perry Bensons’s truly disturbing Dad, and young writer/director Steven Sheil is to be congratulated for finishing the project in next to no time and on a minuscule budget as part of Film London’s Microwave scheme. Having said that, it might be asked whether public money – in the form of both British and European Regional Development funds, lottery cash and some involvement from BBC films – is best spent on the kind of horror movie the commercial sector puts out in droves, even if this is, on the whole, a superior example of the genre.

Despite its considerable visual flair and admirable leanness, Mum & Dad ultimately fails to quite live up to the darkness at its own heart. The Wests and their ilk hover over the sometimes graphic proceedings, and the film achieves some genuinely nasty moments with great economy of means and a gift for understatement; but there are also scenes that veer uncomfortably towards cliché, unsuccessful black comedy and a certain kind of British naturalism – rather as if Mike Leigh had remade The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The intention may have been to show the way in which the most brutal impulses and perverse lifestyles can become normalised within family structures, but it doesn’t always come off, and this is largely due to the underwritten parts of Mum and Dad themselves, who remain simply grotesque, and rather dated, parodies of a certain kind of a of working class family rather than genuine characters in their own right.

All in all, though, this is an impressive feature debut which genre fans will warm to and the faint-hearted should perhaps avoid – and it suggests that while the obviously talented Sheil may not have succeeded in making the definitive Fred and Rosemary West movie, he’s certainly a director to watch.

In cinemas, on DVD (Revolver Entertainment, £15.99), Pay-Per-View and Video on Demand now