A car lies shattered and overturned on the road, smoke silently drifting off the wreckage. The opening shot of Danish director Jeanette Nordahl’s Wildland sets the uncompromising tone for a landscape of damage ahead. This tense, unnerving tale of an orphaned girl’s entrapment in a criminal family throbs with pain and danger under a tightly controlled surface. The film may haunt your dreams, and a few of your waking hours as well.

The ill-fated vehicle was driven by a mother who died in the crash. Her teenage daughter, Ida, escaped with an injured arm, although how lucky she was to get out alive will be open to debate. In his office, a hard-faced, matter-of-fact male social worker informs Ida that she’ll be deposited with an estranged branch of the family she barely knows. Sandra Gulberg Kampp, as Ida, makes us feel for the girl’s plight. Her watchful, flinty face struggles to hide not only vulnerability and fear but any trace of premature hope.

At first, the home where Ida is dropped off feels like a warm haven. A still-got-it sexy mom, Bodil (Sidse Babett Knudsen), makes cozy breakfasts and presides proudly over a household of three grown sons. They are soon revealed as a cretin who does nothing but smoke weed, box, and play video games (Besir Zeciri); a dull-eyed addict on the run from impending fatherhood (Elliott Crossett Hove); and a preening, macho boss of some sort of unnamed enterprise (Joachim Fjelstrup).

The girl tries to fit in, gingerly navigating a treacherous household where the alternately affectionate and sinister Bodil rules the roost and the women in the brothers’ lives are belittled, ignored, or worse. Ida is no fool and can see that the relationships are twisted and the family business crooked, but she’s isolated and helpless. She can’t evade the manipulations the family uses to both keep her off balance and win her loyalty, and the part of her that wants to belong is pleased to be included. When the brothers draw Ida into a criminal sortie that goes disastrously wrong and attracts police attention, the incident will test her allegiance, courage, and morals.

Shot in Scandi-style neutral tones with abundant use of natural light, Wildland is an outwardly subdued, cerebral work, but it moves fast and takes abrupt, scary turns. Warm embraces become sinister chokeholds. Power dynamics shift in a few words. Hands move out of frame, and we instinctively know they are going to commit terrible deeds. Like the riffraff characters at its center, the movie knows how to incite fear and step over boundaries. This smart, sharply observed film is pessimistic to be sure, but coldly believable as seen through the eyes of its luckless, lonely protagonist.