In the nature/nurture debate thrumming under the sombre surface of The Childhood of a Leader – the portrait of a tyrant in waiting – first-time director Brady Corbet sits on an iron fence. You could blame the parents, but you might also discern in the story’s moppet dictator a streak of wanton nastiness that is purely his own. Opening on a newsreel montage of the world at war, the film’s portentous atmosphere is stoked by an extraordinary orchestral score by Scott Walker, skittering and screeching around the edge of an epochal nervous breakdown.

Set in a grand dilapidated chateau against the backdrop of politicking at Versailles in 1919, a more intimate power struggle goes on between a 10-year-old boy (Tom Sweet) and his parents, a devout Catholic mother (Bérénice Bejo) and a somewhat remote diplomat father (Liam Cunningham). They cannot understand why their angelic-looking offspring has been hurling stones at random churchgoers, and the parish priest’s interview with the miscreant reveals no stirrings of remorse.