Ella Smith and Justin Salinger in Ray & Liz (KimStim)

British photographer turned filmmaker Richard Billingham has re-created his teenage years of the 1970s and early ’80s, and in doing so has constructed an epiphany-free zone. Set in a high-rise council flat and a dilapidated terraced home in Birmingham, the film is somewhat a return to the kitchen-sink drama, but with a heavy dose of 21st century miserablism. Instead of the drama centering on the Angry Young Man a la John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, Billingham spotlights the resigned, middle-aged alcoholic. If anyone here displays a volatile temper, it’s the mother figure. “Liz got a little bit of Nazi in her. That’s where she gets her temper from,” says one observer.

The Turner Prize-nominated Billingham previously made a photography series, Ray’s a Laugh (1996), inspired by his dad. He returns to his family once again. “By going back to the original locations where events took place, I hope to be authentic and represent what life looks like,” he said in the press notes. “For me, it’s about lived experience.” Indeed, his debut feature film is immersive, if not suffocating and disturbing.

There are many reasons why this drama departs from the many British films set in a similar working-class milieu during the country’s waning industrial days and the clampdown on the welfare state by Margaret Thatcher. Billingham captures the day-to-day rhythm of the household in situ, but instead of feeling trapped by their circumstances, the characters, who serve as stand-ins for the director’s family, make do with what little they’ve got—silence takes the place of dialogue and diatribes. The rundown setting provides the context and is really a main character, from the walls that badly need replastering and new wallpaper to the rabbit turds on the couch and the puddle of urine by the door. Apparently, no one in the family takes the dog on a walk. Not surprisingly, drab brown is the primary color.

The film opens in the present, with Ray (Patrick Romer) slowly waking up—alone—and immediately taking his first swig of the day. He subsists solely on the homemade booze delivered daily by a dependable friend, who brings exactly three 1.5 liters of brown fluid and sets the plastic bottles on the bedside table ritualistically, one by one. The routine of daily life is established early on: it includes, in the first of two flashbacks, the forever wiry Ray (now played by Justin Salinger) obediently serving tea to his large, heavily-tattooed, and sedentary wife, Liz (Ella Smith), as she sits and figures out a jigsaw puzzle that she rarely completes, chain-smoking all the while. For both, a stash of bottles of booze in the basement is a prized possession. Its exact location is kept secret.

The couple’s two young sons are more or less on their own, particularly the older boy, the counterpart for Billingham, who mostly remains in his room with his books. When Liz does reveal her maternal feelings, it is more likely to be toward her menagerie of animals than her children, and she goes so far as to later bundle her pet rabbit in a baby carriage. Yet even the animals have to fend for themselves. In one of the film’s more sensational moments, the family’s pet pooch licks up from the living room floor fresh vomit from an inebriated and passed out man.

Few penetrate this insular bubble; there is none of the communal camaraderie found in a Ken Loach film. As a result, any inchoate anger is directed inwardly, especially in the first half—which is a tough sit—as Ray’s brother, who has a mental disability, is taken advantage of by a friend before being physically abused by Liz.

The film poses a challenge for those who admire it: mainly, how to convince others to see it, given its resolute, uncompromisingly harsh vision, which is nevertheless convincing and discomforting. Yet hope hovers in the background; the film suggests that people can change, but perhaps not everyone is willing to do so. (After all, the eldest son presumably grows up to become the film’s director.)

Billingham certainly offers a sobering anecdote to the current crop of plucky British uplift, such as the upcoming feel-good romp Blinded by the Light, also set in the ’80s, centering on a Springsteen-obsessed teenage son of Pakistani immigrants. It takes place in another galaxy far, far away.