Exhibition, review - Telegraph Hogg's 2011 feature Archipelago was about a well-to-do English family on a miserable holiday on Tresco in the Scilly Isles: her new film, Exhibition, which has its world premiere at the Locarno Film Festival today, sticks with the same social class but shifts its focus to the capital. Even more so than Archipelago and Unrelated, her 2007 debut, Exhibition feels like a strange and spiky riposte to the creeping Richard Curtis-isation of London - and I write as someone who enjoyed the new Curtis film About Time. Hogg's film is set almost entirely between the walls and windows of a modernist dream-house in a leafy Victorian enclave. Living inside it are a couple, played by two first-time actors: Viv Albertine, a former guitarist from the punk band The Slits, and the conceptual artist Liam Gillick. Their initials are D and H - we never hear their full names - and both are artists who work from home. How much work is actually being done, though, is debatable: while she footles on her laptop, we hear his office chair trundling around aimlessly in the room above. Their relationship is in rude health, at least sexually - H telephones D during office hours in the hope she might pop upstairs for some afternoon hanky-panky. But something in their past has left both of them unquiet. Hogg withholds the specifics, but two topics keep blowing through the film like mist: the absence of children from their lives and the danger of the city streets at night. Adding to their unease is the fact that their house is on the market. Tom Hiddleston and Harry Kershaw, both of whom have worked with Hogg before, have extended cameos as a pair of magisterially bland estate agents. D is anxious that her home's new owners will remodel it or knock it down entirely, and we realise that it has become to her a kind of protective bubble. Its fish-tank windows remind you of the apartments stacked like televisions in Jacques Tati's Playtime, but Hogg plays games with their glassy surfaces, nesting reflections inside reflections to the point where we can no longer tell if the camera is indoors or out. At other times, the delineation between public and private becomes a punchline, and there is a funny skit about car parking rights, and an amusingly awful dinner party from which D makes a clever escape. It becomes clear that D is agoraphobic, and she stands behind the Venetian blinds in her underwear, toying with the idea of being observed at her most vulnerable but only daring to ruffle the slats. She is planning a performance art event, and Albertine deftly sketches her arc from inhibition to exhibition, leaving no sliver of her soul unbared. Hogg's film is alive with anxiety, with scenes that rattle your nerves like stones in a tin: often the noise of the city presses in against the walls, and the outside world feels like a tangle of accidents waiting to pounce. This is confident, uncompromising work, with a ghostliness that plays on your mind for days, and it cements Hogg's place at the forefront of new British cinema.