If you don't catch the reference from the opening scene, you'll feel like an idiot if you read a review that points it out. But (without spoiling it), everything that happens afterwards is a pretty direct lift from the actual natural process the scene shows us.

Handyman and gardener Tom (Jesse Eisenberg, slightly miscast) and preschool teacher Gemma (Imogen Poots) are a young couple at the stage of looking for a house of their own. They find themselves in the office of a prickly professional, all-too friendly and altogether weird estate agent, Martin.

They're not won over by his canned enthusiasm and fake friendliness but agree to follow him to a neighbourhood to look at a house he promises they'll love. As soon as Tom and Gemma pull up they're pretty sure it's not for them but they go in and look around for a lark, the inside as sterile and bland as the neighbourhood outside (in what should have been their first warning, every house and every street is identical).

But while they're in the manicured backyard, the estate agent leaves the house and drives away, leaving them alone. Bemused, they drive off too, soon finding they don't know their way out.

At first the pair assume it's because of the sameness of the houses and the layout of the streets, but hours later when they're still driving around looking for an exit – especially when they spend hours following the setting sun and end up right back at the house they've been looking around – it becomes genuinely scary.

The film never identifies the beings that have decided to trap the couple in the suburban purgatory, or the metaphysics that borders their new universe, but it's soon apparent Tim and Gemma are prisoners. Even desperate acts like setting fire to the house have no effect, everything back to normal and the house still standing after the smoke clears.

Food that has no taste is dropped off in a box in the middle of the road every night to keep them alive, and there's no way out. Worse still, another box shows up one morning with a baby in it, marked with instructions to raise it and they'll be let go.

The kid (Senan Jennings) is more of a nightmare than the neverending suburb. He insists on watching TV where there's nothing but a surreal series of patterns playing. When he's hungry he sits at the table and literally screams until Tom and Gemma feed him. He mimics them, repeating things they've said angrily to each other during arguments in spookily adult tones.

Tom responds to their situation by withdrawing. When he becomes convinced the way out is down, he spends his days digging a hole on the front lawn. Gemma doesn't know what to do, veering between wondering if she should love and care for the child and pining after her withdrawn boyfriend.

It's a longer than normal, nervy Twilight Zone episode, and an imaginative one at that. The central metaphor (from the opening scene) is well situated in the narrative but it does lag a bit, director Lorcan Finnegan taking a bit of a Wes Anderson approach of taking too long blocking and shooting squares and right angles, prim people standing ramrod straight.

There's a bigger subtext about the soul-sucking nature of middle class suburban life that's also there but not as original, alluding to how every day can feel the same, the view in every direction and even the weather unchanging and how raising children can be thankless and extract all the youth and vitality out of you.

And if you've come to care about Tom, Gemma or both of them, the ending (despite containing the requisite closure) is wholly awful for them, the story a classic sci-fi/thriller trope where something amazing or horrible has happened countless times before and will again, we just happen to be seeing one random set of victims suffer through it.

It's well designed but the execution is a little bit as staid as the visuals at times.