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It is like the film in miniature; it mimics the way in which director Joanna Hogg carefully assigns the camera its place, and lets the emotions swell between the characters within the frame; the way in which the quiet, polite Leightons each try to maintain composure despite their growing upset.

In documenting this milieu, Hogg has gone out on a limb as a British filmmaker. That’s all the more true because of the kind of films she makes: laconic, gentle, yet delicately excruciating dramas of social unease.

In some movies, especially those operating under the self-conscious rubric of the art film, such choices can feel emptily ritualistic. In "Archipelago," the long shots serve a more basic function: They allow you to see, really see, characters in their natural and unnatural habitats. It's not for nothing that when you first see the family's cook, Rose (Amy Lloyd), the shot cuts off her head: it's a virtual beheading that announces her place in this exquisite, terrible world.

Indeed, the emotional inhibition of the English upper class is hardly new, but Hogg’s understated handling of the subject is fresh and challenging.

Archipelago is that rare British film that doesn't neglect form for content, or vice versa, but instead belongs to a trend of rich, suggestive art films that take as their starting points people and the daily politics that emerge between them, developing character and dramatic tension by following through with honesty the repeated rituals of everyday life.

Filmed in permanent twilight with a static camera and no music, it is gloomy and unrewarding with an oblique and uninformative script. Playing emotionally constipated characters, the actors improvise much of the dialogue. Prospects beyond audiences happy to suffer for a dose of sedate Englishness are as dim as the film’s lighting.

It's a confident advance on the earlier picture and one of the three most formally interesting British movies of the past few years, all directed (or co-directed) by women, the other two being Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor's Helen and Clio Barnard's The Arbor.

Archipelago is a sharply observed and excruciatingly honest exploration of family relationships and the mess that we call life. Hogg has proven herself here to be one of Britain’s most important film-makers.

Hogg shows herself to be a proper artist by paying attention, not just to the charged silences of an unhappy family but to the physical oddities of landscape... But she colludes in the lack of liveliness by keeping the camera at a middle-distance... It obstructs whatever warmth we might have felt for them in the absence of anything approaching a sense of humour. As a study in strangled English politesse this film has something to say; I only wish its voice carried a little more vigour.

There is something exacting and audacious in it, something superbly controlled in its composition and technique. The clarity of her film-making diction is a marvel – even, or perhaps especially, when the nature of the story itself remains murkily unrevealed... It's a difficult watch and a difficult sell, but this is quietly outstanding.

Archipelago can’t help but stand out as a depiction of wealthy toffs... Bitter and resentful of one another, their disappointment towards life is apparent in every perfectly composed scene. Long still pictures of a leisurely vacation on one of the lush Scilly Isles are marred by the characters’ miserable bickering.

If one occasionally becomes wearied by the unsympathetic combination of privilege and discontent, it can’t be denied that Hogg and her talented cast have a superbly delicate way with tension: particularly unforgettable is a restaurant meal in which an unsatisfactory guinea fowl makes a deal-breaking appearance.