Angus Mattock (Charlie Robb) explains: “this by the way, for anyone under the age of 18, is called a map, and it’s made of paper”.

This is an apt introduction to our protagonist, who projects himself as a cockily self-reliant man full of wisdoms,which merit being didactically passed on to his audience. Yet here his audience is merely a camera, while he himself is, for all his patronising superiority about map use, already lost – and that is even before he has arrived at the remote woods where an isolated glamping home awaits – a prize ‘Anonymous Retreat’ that he has won on Instagram, and that he admits that he could not otherwise afford.

In fact Angus has long been lost. His confident bravado before the many cameras that he has brought along to document his experiences is clearly a front, as he flubs lines and reshoots constantly. Back in the city, he is, or was, a professional editor. Once in this cabin in the woods, it is clear that all his claims to wild-man survivalist skills are a similar fiction, as he lives off food and booze that he has brought with him in shopping bags, and similarly fails the most basic tests presented by his sylvan environment.

Angus is obviously the loner of the title, peculiarly parted from Katie (Jessica Summer) back home whom he professes to be the love of his life, and overtly annoyed to have his solitude disrupted even when he crosses paths ever so briefly with a fellow hiker (Kat Johns-Burke) upon first entering the woods. Later, as this woman – a literal Eve in this idyll, for that is her name – comes to Angus’ cabin clearly in a state of distress, he roughly spurns her requests for help and forces her back out into the darkness. He prefers her absence to any company that she might offer. Angus draws a smiley face on the log by his fire, dubs it Kenny, and expressly likens it to Wilson from Robert Zemeckis’ Cast Away (2000), as though he were Tom Hanks’ Chuck Noland trapped on a desert island.

The truth is that Angus is trapped, stuck in a self-imposed exile as he searches for something – not just food and warmth and escape, but also his real, deeply hidden feelings, and the significance both of himself and of life. His conversations, whether with Kenny or with the cameras (and through them with us), are entirely solipsistic. After all, Kenny is just a hunk of wood, so that Angus is, quite literally, talking to the trees – and there is no wifi available out in this wilderness, so that none of what Angus films is being live-streamed or seen by others. And like anyone who has an online presence, Angus is split between how he chooses to present himself to the world and who he really is. After all, on camera he is prone to self-glorifying stories and a certain self-serving dishonesty (about Katie, for example), and it takes extreme circumstances for him to drop his pretensions and open up, exposing something of his true self to the elements. So in exploring these strange, increasingly hostile environs, Angus is also on a quest for self.

Near the beginning of his adventures, while in the cabin discussing how much Katie would have loved all that he is experiencing, Angus suddenly turns to camera and declares, “mental health’s a big things these days of course, a big thing” – and in case we suppose that he is still talking about Katie, he adds, “especially for us guys.” It is an early indication of one interpretative route through this film’s narrative. For the strange, unseen woodland creature that beleaguers Angus more and more may just be all his anxieties and insecurities coming home to roost. Alternatively, Angus may be falling prey to the kind of woodland spirit documented by Eve’s book on local Celtic folk history. Either way, there is something monstrous that is messing with Angus’ mind, and that keeps him from leaving the forest, making his life an ever more terrifying hell of disorientation, delusion and despair.

Even as Loner drifts from psychodrama to folk horror and back again, there is another uncanny ambiguity that will leave viewers feeling no less able than Angus himself to see the wood for the trees. For while this presents itself as classic found footage, all sourced from diegetic cameras, and even featuring a tearful, terrified to-camera confession that directly evokes a similar iconic scene from Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s The Blair Witch Project (1999), there is no text at the beginning stating that the footage has been discovered, so that we are never sure whether we are watching Angus’ actual last tapes, or something that he and his old editing mate Duncan (significantly played by Robb’s co-director Tawn) have put together to grab and grip a viewing audience. After all, truth and fiction often traverse parallel paths, and one man’s ‘first-person’ documentation of his psychological breakdown and supernatural assault is another man’s horror entertainment. On any reading, though, this impressive, sophisticated feature debut expertly dramatises masculinity in crisis, going round in circles as it gets lost in (its own) nature.

The world premiere of Loner takes place during the 33rd edition of Raindance, between June 18th and 27th.