I never knew much about Billie Piper as an actress – as far as I was aware she was a poppy soap star (maybe a soapy pop star) in the the UK in the 90s and 2000s, and I knew she'd done a TV series where she played a working girl (Secret Diary of a Call Girl) that was just edgy enough to give her some cred.

But I never would have guessed she had any ambitions around being a filmmaker, and I never would have guessed she'd be this good at it.

Not that the movie's good, exactly. It's very creative, very assured and very avant garde in everything from the script to the visual flourishes she applies as a director, but the story doesn't make much sense or tell you in plain enough terms what it wants to say.

But the reason I still consider Piper a good director is because everything on screen feels like it was exactly the way she wanted it – she wanted it to be cryptic, artistic and for story beats, characters and the scenery to be something unexpected.

It seems to be saying modern love and/or romance are bullshit, or just that you need to find the kind of love and/or romance that isn't bullshit, or anything in between. There's a lot you can interpret and the movie feels like that's just the way she wanted it.

She plays the lead character Mandy, who we meet in what seems to be a blind date, arguing with the man she's sitting opposite about their suitability to each other. He turns out to be Pete (Leo Bill), a juxtaposition in that he's a man of religious faith but also a hopeless cynic, and even though he's Mandy's romantic foil for the entire story you're never sure if they love or hate each other.

Mandy also has a young son who's cute enough but very on the spectrum, something the film doesn't flinch away from showing you the effects from or romanticise in the least. Then there's her parents, from her dryly bitter mother to her smart alecky father (David Thewlis), a pair who's marriage has long since imploded and seems to inform most of what Mandy believes about relationships.

To talk about what actually happens is almost incidental – the narrative in and between scenes doesn't feel imperative enough to the mise en scene Piper imbues it all with to tell you Mandy's story. Inasmuch as there is one it only seems to be about a smart, bumbling, disaffected and borderline enraged woman sick of the pervasive disappointment the promise of love brings but unable to tear herself away from wanting it, even if it's with the wrong man.

It's described as a psychological romantic drama, which sums it up perfectly, and the fact nobody's bothered to write a plot synopsis on the film's Wikipedia page (which is where I usually go when I have to remember the bare bones of the narrative when I come to write the review) speaks volumes about how accessible it is – nobody else apparently really understands how to portray the plot in mere words either.

If Piper wants or goes on to a viable and long term career as a director, this film puts her on a similar level as Greta Gerwig around the time of Little Women – it proves her filmmaking chops but makes you much more interested in what she could do with a more approachable screen story.