The agonizing tug of war between dogma and desire is sharply illustrated in writer-director Laurel Parmet’s feature debut, set inside the claustrophobic confines of a conservative Christian community in Kentucky. Seventeen-year-old Jem (Eliza Scanlen) is at the age her elders believe is the right time to start thinking about a lifelong partner — a choice they’ve pretty much already made for her by setting her up with the pastor’s youngest son. But it's his brooding older brother, married youth leader Owen (Lewis Pullman), who catches Jem’s eye.

The attraction is returned — but, while The Starling Girl does subtly indicate the toxicity of their relationship, it never lets this point eclipse either the more interesting coming-of-age story at its heart or its keen exploration of the wholesale damage that the cult-like church has done to all of its congregants (including Owen). While some of those threads threaten to distract the film’s focus away from its greatest strengths at times, the anguish of that central tussle between Jem's burgeoning sexuality and her otherwise rigidly controlled existence is brought to aching life by sensitive writing and direction and a brilliantly complex lead performance — qualities that ultimately win out to let The Starling Girl fly.

Ever since her breakout role in Sharp Objects, Eliza Scanlen has been putting in richly intelligent performances on the small and big screen, and The Starling Girl is no exception. She magnifies all of the nuance of the writing and direction here, letting us into Jem to give us a sharp sense of what it’s like to exist as a young woman in this repressive environment, where shame is routinely wielded as a truncheon to keep congregants in line. The uber-capable Scanlen skilfully keeps the film teetering on its tortuous precipice — the push and pull of Jem’s natural impulses versus the religious doctrine of her community — before its final scenes, when she wrings something unexpectedly immense and powerful out of the smallest of moments.