Everybody has a plan, and yet there’s little semblance of same in the final act of Ana Piterbarg’s otherwise superior Argentine crime thriller. Oh dear. And it all starts so well, too.

There's a winning touch of Dead Ringers in the neat polarity of the film's central twinship. The two brothers (played with no little aplomb by Viggo Mortensen) are Agustin and Pedro. The former is a pediatrician living in Buenos Aries with a domestic partner (The Secret in Their Eyes' Soledad Villamil), who is keen to adopt a baby. We're soon all too aware of Agustin's discomfort at the notion of this familial expansion. There are hints, too, of a history of depression and general domestic dissatisfaction.

The second sibling, Pedro, is a rugged, earthy beekeeper living out in the lawless, watery wilds of Argentina’s Paran Delta region, the place where he was born.

It requires a surprising sequence of events to lure Agustin back to his ancestral home. His attempts to impersonate Pedro are met with suspicion from Adrin, a bully from childhood now grown into the same genus of Freudian monster as Blue Velvet's Frank. The hive soon provides hints and additional commentary on the plot.

Director Ana Piterbarg’s screenplay (co-written with Anna Cohan) sets out a great-looking stall. The direction is deft: menace hangs thick in the air, steely greys dominate the landscape, the film-makers’ commendably tactile sensibility ensures that we feel every grab and every bee sting.

The atmospherics, alas, somehow fail to cohere to the plot. The tone, additionally, falls between gritty social realism and dreamscape. Mortensen is never less than impressive, but there’s something decidedly unimpressive about his respective characters’ fates. It all seems awfully neat before it all goes terribly pear-shaped.

No matter: this is a remarkably assured first feature from Ms Piterbarg. Well be sure to keep an eye out for her sophomore effort.