The Christian names of the Hayes brothers Son (Shannon), Kid (Jacobs) and Boy (Ligon) would suggest that their parents weren't the family-friendly variety.

And so it proves. Mom is an emotionally-crippled lardbucket fizzing with resentment at pop, a violent soak who walked out on the boys when they were young.

Son, a womanising gambler in a shaky marriage to Annie (Glenda Pannell), acts as a surrogate dad to Kid, an easygoing waster who's lucked out with a good woman, and Boy, a tubby slacker happy living in his campervan.

However, their life of dull, trailer-trash routine in a knackered Arkansas backwater ("If I owned this town I'd sell it," opines Kid) comes to an end with the death of their loathed father.

It turns out that he'd cleaned up his act, kicked the bottle, found God and established a devoutly good life while fathering four more sons with a loving spouse.

Yet Son can't resist gatecrashing the funeral, badmouthing the deceased and reminding his new family that he wasn't always an angel. His final, defiant act of spitting on the coffin sets in train tit-for-tat carnage that threatens to spill out of control.

You would never imagine that this is writer-director Jeff Nichols' first effort, such is his supreme ability to tell a story that both emotionally engages and violently shocks.

These are real people. Son is a flesh-and-blood, self-deluding underachiever desperate to make something of himself yet resigned to a dead-end job of drudgery in a fish farm.

Against a naturally resplendent Arkansas of gorgeous sunsets and idyllic bayous, Kid touchingly dreams of something better while Boy settles for a life as third in the brotherly pecking order.

Building up a head of grim anticipation as resentments simmer and scores need settling, it accelerates towards a climax that is both dramatically fulfilling and absolutely honest.

Son of a gun, this is good. Click off the safety catch and squeeze the trigger.

Tim Evans