Turkish director Selman Nacar made a strong impression with his debut feature, a tough workplace-negligence drama at last year’s San Sebastian film festival. Its indirect narrative style and sense of insidious bureaucratic evasion put me in mind of the Romanian new wave: particularly the performance of Erdem Senocak as Yasin, the bland company lawyer whose task is to pressurise the families of injured employees into signing away their legal rights.

Mucahit Kocak plays Kadir, a pleasant young man who, with his more business-minded elder brother Halil (Bedir Bedir), has taken over the management of the family’s textile factory, on the retirement of their father Ibrahim (Ünal Silver). The work is hard, and the factory is having difficulty delivering on orders, but Kadir is happy enough, excitedly making plans with his fiancee Esma (Burcu Gölgedar). But then his world is upended when an employee is severely burned by an inadequately maintained steam-cleaner and rushed to hospital. Was the worker at fault by not wearing the right safety gear, and being drunk on the job, as the firm instantly and heartlessly insists? Or is this a lie? The man’s wife Serpil (Nezaket Erden) refuses to sign Yasin’s document and an increasingly horrified Kadir discovers that he himself is being set up as the company’s fall guy in case of a prosecution and also that the family and the hospital are complicit in withholding the truth about the man’s condition.

It’s a powerfully made film, though I was a little frustrated that it ends before we discover exactly what price is to be paid and what the outcome of Kadir’s crisis of conscience actually is. There is a tremendous scene in which Kadir has an uncomfortable dinner with his future parents-in-law, and is prevailed upon to play the saz (a kind of lute) for them, while inwardly agonising about his family’s secrets and lies.

• Between Two Dawns is available on 15 August on Mubi.