Francie is a dreadful child. With his flaming hair and running gab he could charm the birds down from the trees if he so pleased - the women in the grocery shop are beguiled - but he’s just as likely to turn this fevered imagination to ill-ends. Imagine, say, Just William by way of A Clockwork Orange.

He lives with Ma and Da (the excellent Aisling O’Sullivan and Jordan regular Stephen Rae), and has a best pal called Joe (the innocent-faced Alan Boyle). The time is the early 60s, just the Cold War is hotting up. That’s the atmosphere Francie distils in his over-active brain - all global paranoia and personal slight - eventually focusing his intensity into the pure hatred of Mrs Nugent (Fiona Shaw) and her prissy son Phillip (Andrew Fullerton). As his own life disintegrates - Ma’s depression has her taken to ‘the garage’ to be fixed; Da’s a hopeless drunk - Francie’s rage mounts, his actions becoming ever more unpredictable and, eventually, psychotic. Released after a spell in a harsh Catholic reform school, tragedy beckons.

It’s hard to imagine the audience for Jordan’s extraordinary little picture. Yes, admirers of Patrick McCabe’s striking (if overrated) novel to which it’s remarkably faithful. But beyond them, the script’s ability to turn from hysterical and grotesque on a sixpence is troubling, and its steadfast refusal to moralise will disturb many. That the whole is filtered through the mouth of the appalling but utterly compelling Owens just ices the cake. Freeing the story from McCabe’s somewhat irksome linguistic and grammatical tropes only increases the sense of unease.

This world is part Irish cliché - headscarved gossips, religious icons, JFK commemorative plates and communal singalongs - and part bizarre fantasy culled from the TV cowboys and space opera comics the boys consume as eagerly as Flash Bars. So natural is Jordan’s milieu that by the end, Francie’s increasingly outlandish fantasies of insect-headed priests and an atomic blast in the nearby lake (a shocking image), grow naturally out of the material: we have become willing partners in his crime.

That’s what makes this Jordan’s best film since his stunning debut Angel way back in 1982. He shows no fear, from the foul-mouthed boys - ‘Fuck off, fish!’ - to Sinead O’Connor’s earthy Virgin Mary manifesting herself to young Francie. Performances are pitched on a knife-edge, but none - not even the bug-eyed Shaw - topple over.

Couple that with a brilliantly integrated soundtrack that presses into service popular song (most noticeably a kitsch reading of ‘Mack The Knife’), Da’s trumpet and Elliott Goldenthall’s notable score, and you end up with a striking piece of dark magic realism. A disturbed, disturbing, daring venture, really quite unlike anything else around.