Simon Ross’s capable debut can be hung in a gallery of films featuring unnerving paintings, from The Picture of Dorian Gray to Ghostbusters 2 and In the Mouth of Madness. Wife turned carer Sofia (Natalia Córdova-Buckley) stumbles across an uncanny canvas in the attic of the mansion to which she has brought her catatonic husband Alex (Ryan Kwanten); it is supposedly a self-portrait of his great-grandfather, but she is startled to find that it is a spitting image of Alex. While this gothic chestnut, and the psychodrama that follows – with Sofia unsure how much is the product of her own under-siege mind – feel familiar, Ross injects them with a troubling inner turbulence that bodes well for him.

Apparently a doting, endlessly patient spouse, Sofia hides a guilty secret: she was the one responsible for Alex’s brain injury in an accident during a marital tiff. She has brought him back to the family pile in the hope of reviving his memories, but their sojourn upturns the wrong kind of history. When Sofia inquires after the portrait, the glowering progenitor turns out to have been an irredeemably violent man. Holed up in the house with only occasional contact with well-spoken gardener Brookes (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) and outre cousin Mags (Virginia Madsen), she begins feeling the eyes of her doppelganger husband weighing heavily on her.

First off, props to whoever did the brushwork, which is spectral and menacing. A stormcloud of implied violence looms over everything, with a disturbing ambiguity about its true source – the possibly supernatural daubing, or deeply buried resentment in Alex, or somehow sublimated from Sofia’s self-flagellating guilt. It’s this psychological knot that gives the film its power, much more so than some indifferently staged bumps in the night and other haunted-house standard features that The Portrait contains. Córdova-Buckley, with her gravelly voice, anchors it, later hitting the bottle and making a clumsy pass at the gardener. With her help, Ross takes an old frame and imbues it with an imposing dark energy.

• The Portrait is available on digital platforms from 11 December.