Millie (Ana Scotney) has a hot ticket from Wellington to New York for a coveted internship at a prestigious architecture firm – but just as the plane is about to take off, she has a panic attack and disembarks. In denial about what’s happened, and unable to afford another flight ticket, she decides to keep up the pretence online to her friends, family and followers while lying low in her hometown. And as she digs herself deeper into the rabbit hole of online fakery (copy-and-paste Instagram stories, taking Skype calls in alleys that mimic New York brickwork), she is forced to reckon with just who she is truly lying to: herself or the people around her.

This highly entertaining debut feature from Kiwi director Michelle Savill is at once a shrewd character study and an ingenious satire on the idealised lifestyle to which so many aspire.

It’s the late 1980s, and Maren (Taylor Russell) and her father (André Holland) have been on the run for years as a result of their terrible addictive compulsions. Is it drugs? Alcohol? Not quite.

They are 'eaters' – secret cannibals who live by carefully constructed rules in their compulsion for human flesh. But when Maren is abandoned by her father on her 18th birthday, she heads off on a mission across America in search of her mother, who might be able to shed light on why she is the way she is. Along the way, she falls in love with Lee (Timothée Chalamet), an intense, beautiful runaway with whom she attempts to make a life together.

Not quite Hannibal Lecter, the cannibalism in this bloody parable is closer to a metaphor for marginalisation. And it’s through this warped lens of innocence that director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name, Suspiria) frames the film’s forbidden young love.