Australian director Cate Shortland has made three feature films about young women who find themselves out of their depths. Her first, Somersault (2004), set in wintry Jindabyne, featured Abbie Cornish in an early and memorable role as a troubled teenage runaway. Lore (2012) was adapted from Rachel Seiffert’s Booker-shortlisted novel The Dark Room; its titular character, the daughter of Nazis, must lead her younger siblings on a difficult journey across Germany during the last days of World War II. Shortland’s new film, Berlin Syndrome, also takes places in Germany, as the title suggests, and is also adapted from a novel. But the setting is contemporary, and the plot concerns Clare (Teresa Palmer), an Australian tourist and photographer, whose chance meeting with a local man has awful consequences.

The sense of threatened, and threatening, submersion that characterises Shortland’s films is as much visual as psychological. She uses a cool, sea-blue palette, and her close-up shots often have a shallow depth of field, so that certain objects loom into focus while the rest are a watery blur. Guileless young women drift through these submarine realms, as if they will take whatever comes their way, though they may struggle, intermittently, to find solid ground. This tilting between acquiescence and self-possession made Somersault, in particular, very moving, but the imbalance of states is greater in Berlin Syndrome, and the naïveté of the main character feels far less credible.