My Wonderful Stranger

Johanna Pyykkö makes her feature film debut with an atmospheric drama where a solitary teenager stages a fictitious reality for a man with no memory.

When the upper-class couple with the fancy villa go on vacation, they leave the keys with Ebba. She works as a cleaner, helps with the garden, and lives in a cottage on the property. It's not long before Ebba starts fantasizing that it's she who lives in the big house, and when she meets an injured man with amnesia, she casts him as the boyfriend in her new pretend life. Camilla Godø Krohn delivers a uniquely sulky teenage performance in Swedish-Finnish Johanna Pyykkö's thought-provoking feature debut, which both highlights the boundary-crossing allure of imagination and reminds us of the danger in turning play into lies.

• Jonas Holmberg