While its title suggests a prison break or similar action drama, The Escape involves a scenario that is a lot more day-to-day, and probably more familiar than many women may admit. It’s a bold and powerful piece of storytelling, which feels desperately relevant.

It also features an exceptional performance by Gemma Arterton as a suburban wife and mother who is suffocated by the unfulfilling daily routine of her family life and seeks to break free.

Rather than turn her dilemma into soap opera, writer/director Dominic Savage creates a partly naturalistic, partly impressionistic portrait of a woman struggling with the terrible knowledge that the happiness she seeks has nothing to do with the supposedly perfect life in front of her. The fact that this realisation includes a growing disinterest in her children adds a non-conformist provocation to the mix.

Tara (Arterton) and husband Mark (Dominic Cooper) are attractive young parents – working-class South-East Londoners by the sound of it – now comfortably ensconced in Kent, in a lovely house, with two cars parked outside and his unspecified but well-paid job keeping them in luxury. As he puts it: “Lucky, int we?”

Sadly, Mark is not that empathetic and singularly fails to see that a routine of housework and school runs – not to say serving as little more than a vessel every time he feels a sexual urge – is making his wife slowly die inside. He’s not a bad man, just an emotional idiot, and the contrasts between his smothering, complacent kisses and her alternatively Sphinx-like or tear-filled stares into the distance speaks of the chasm between them.

Savage’s narrative approach is highly economical, with scant, seemingly improvised dialogue, frequent use of close-ups and an otherwise unfussy, handheld camera to illustrate the couple’s domestic lives.

There’s little said of the couple’s background, though it seems a case of childhood sweethearts, one beginning to outgrow the other; their circle of friends is dispensed with in a single scene – a BBQ – in which Tara’s guests seem oblivious to her evident emotional disarray.

One amusingly simple observation is made through the young children – a perpetually needy, screaming boy and a sweet, self-sufficient girl mirroring their parents, by gender, to a T.

The film’s focus is always Tara, first establishing her pain – what might be called an Everywoman’s existential crisis – then driving her towards some kind of action to alleviate it.

Like Tara, Arterton may know a thing or two about being objectified, with some of her early casting in blockbuster films like Clash of the Titans possibly based on looks rather than ability. But she’s hugely talented, proving that both on stage and increasingly in film; the fact that she executive produced The Escape speaks volumes about her personal investment in the project.

In front of the camera, she has two difficult tasks – projecting a great deal of internalised emotion, largely through silent close-ups, and maintaining sympathy for Tara when she makes choices that some viewers may find cold, even cruel. She succeeds in both, brilliantly, in a nuanced performance that makes her character at once recognisable and a little mysterious.

Cooper does well with a thankless role, showing Mark’s fear and vulnerability as he realises he doesn’t have the emotional intelligence to cope with the crisis before him.

Tara’s growing interest in art, and Paris, may seem overly cute escape routes, and some scenes in France represent the film’s only bum notes. But Savage gets away with them, not least because Arterton so beautifully conveys the sheer joy of a woman realising that there’s a whole new world in which she might belong.