Cinema's Greek new wave has brought us exciting movies such as Yorgos Lanthimos's Dogtooth and Athina Rachel Tsangari's Attenberg – films with a bracingly angular, deadpan challenge. Now we have Alexandros Avranas's troubling drama Miss Violence, a macabre movie about evil that also contrives to be about Greece's own national anguish. It is a film with real technique, but it revives my worry that Greek film-makers are cultivating a self-conscious mannerism of the bizarre.

Themis Panou is a pudgy middle-aged accountant who lives in a modest Athens flat with his wife (Reni Pittaki), their daughter Eleni (Eleni Roussinou) and a number of younger children. At her 11th birthday party, Angeliki (Chloe Bolota) kills herself by jumping from the apartment balcony, and the family insist to visiting welfare officials that it must have been an accident. But there's an eerie dysfunction and unhappiness in this family, centring on the man of the house. This bald, overweight blank-faced pater familias has been hit hard by the recession and forced to take a humiliating job created artificially by a government scheme to combat unemployment in the over-50s.

Miss Violence is a tale of abuse and denial, about people who live in a claustrophobically enclosed world, although the sense of mystery is replaced by pure horror with a brutal and conclusive revelation, placed about three-quarters of the way into the film. Was the preceding action just a tease?

Avranas owes a good deal to Michael Haneke (particularly his The Seventh Continent) and to the Mexican auteur Jorge Michel Grau and his own family nightmare We Are What We Are. It (self-evidently) does not have the humour of those movies by Lanthimos and Tsangari and by that token, less of their richness and inventiveness. But its force can't be doubted.