Fish Tank

We’re in the British kitchen-sink genre, subcategory coming-of-age. Little girls swap ciggies and nick their mums’ booze; no one talks when they can shriek; the C-word, so taboo in the US and so necessary to English daily life, is sprayed everywhere like graffiti. Mia’s face is hard and shut down when anyone else is in the room; only when she’s alone do we see what she really looks like. Cross her, though, and she’ll head-butt you in the nose.

“Fish Tank’’ is the story of what happens when Mia meets her mother’s new boyfriend and has a chance at a dance audition, and it unfolds with both startling immediacy and a creeping sense that you’ve seen it all before. The writer-director is Andrea Arnold, who made the similarly unnerving “Red Road’’ in 2006; she’s either on the verge of becoming a major talent or turning stylish and soft. In any event, the opening scenes of “Fish Tank’’ are enough to break your heart. With a bare minimum of dialogue - none of which I can print - Arnold establishes Mia’s barren environment and the hope and fury that war beneath the surface of the girl’s skin.

The mother, Joanne (Kierston Wareing), is still young and pretty, not yet dead inside but on the way, and Mia has a kid sister, Tyler (Rebecca Griffiths), who’s a smart little street rat. When Joanne brings the rangy, sexy Connor (Michael Fassbender) home from the pub one night, his maleness fills a void the three women didn’t even know was there.

Mia especially is taken with this easygoing man who volleys her insults right back, encourages her dancing, and never looks at her like he wants to eat her up. That only makes her hungrier, and Arnold rather brilliantly uses pacing, lighting, music (including a choice Bobby Womack cover of “California Dreamin’ ’’) to build a mood of gentle yet insistent eroticism. Everyone knows where this is going, and everyone seems powerless to stop it.