Back when Hollywood was falling in love with huge rambunctious CGI epics of sci fi and thrills, I remember thinking what a rich vein of storytelling the aboriginal dreamtime myths would offer, and what a cool movie it would make if some enterprising Australian producer convinced an America studio to part with $100m to give on the big screen cinematic treatment.

Instead, the only stories concerning aboriginal belief systems we ever got were urban or traditional dramas like The Tracker, Blackfellas, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith or Samson and Delilah (though no less great movies for it).

But The Moogai comes the closest to what I imagined would really work all those years ago, albeit a low budget monster flick rather than a blockbuster with flashing lights and endless kinetic movement.

In the early 1970s, a black sedan with two buttoned down government types pull up in a remote aboriginal community where the no nonsense matriarch of the family stands her ground with the black suited G-men, the kids scattering into the bush to avoid the forced separation policies that led to the Stolen Generations.

Two of them hide in a cave, and when the government agents give up and leave, the two girls make to leave until an otherworldly snarl rings out from the darkness behind them.

Years later, we meet Sarah (Shari Sebbens), a First Nations woman who was taken from her birth mother and raised by a white family and who's now a successful businesswomen on the cusp of a huge promotion. She lives in an idyllic house overlooking the water with her husband Fergus (Meyne Wyatt) and their preteen daughter Chloe.

Sarah is also pregnant with their forthcoming second baby, but when she collapses at home in advance of the birth, doctors wonder whether they can save her. Sarah pulls through but the orders from the doctor are emphatic; rest.

The problem is that while she was under, something visited Sarah, and she starts to see it all around the house in nightmares, visions and what she starts to fear is reality. She falls asleep and wakes up to find the baby has been moved to some other part of the room or somewhere else in the house altogether.

She wakes up to see the figure of a young girl in the bedroom doorway with long black hair (a slight nod to J-horror?) and no pupils in her staring white eyes.

Sarah's worried she's losing her mind, no matter how much the doctor (and her understanding husband) tell her it's fatigue and stress as her body recovers.

But to make matters more complicated, her birth mother Ruth has recently come back into Sarah's life – much to her displeasure, having grown up assuming the woman gave her away – and tells Sarah she's being haunted by a monster that intends to steal her children, and she wants to help protect them using the ways of her people, customs Sarah has long since rejected.

But the tension and terror builds, and when it leads to a fight against a quite inventive creature (quick bit of trivia – I've interviewed the makeup artists who created it in my day job as a film reporter) in the bush in rings of fire, writer/director Jon Bell makes it plain he's making a crowdpleasing horror film with thematic elements rather than a political statement.

If you're after excessive, exploitation-level gore and violence you're going to be disappointed. For most of the runtime it's about tension and characters, and thankfully Sebbens carries the entire film very ably – there isn't an ounce of cultural cringe or the forced ockerism a lot of commercial Australian films used to be hobbled by.

It also didn't even occur to me until after the fact that despite the commercial appeal, it actually was a social commentary movie as subtextual as Dawn of the Dead was about mindless consumerism. The horror of an insidious, malevolent force taking your children away was very real for aboriginal people for decades, and I'd be interested to know if the creature of the title was a dreamtime myth or a boogeyman made up since in the face of the government's forced removal policies.

But it's well acted and written throughout, builds to a conclusion that's satisfying if not earth-shaking, and the balance of horror, thrills, plot and theme is just right.