In this time of greater understanding of neurodiversity, we’re seeing a new wave of storytellers exploring their own relationships with this identity and set of traits, which incorporate conditions such as autism and ADHD as well as various learning disabilities. Bertil Nilsson’s Masc, showing this autumn in Toronto’s Platform strand and BFI London’s First Feature Competition, is one of the deepest looks at life on the autistic spectrum to date in fiction filmmaking, especially as it might relate intersectionally to questions of masculinity, queerness and race.

The film takes the form of a concise, comic character study, following twenty-something Londoner Robin (Joshua Griffin, who also assisted on the story with Nilsson) as he cycles through different, ill-fitting job opportunities, friends and potential romantic connections, the interactions always emphasising his attempts to comfortably fit in, or “mask”, as the title’s near-double entendre has it. Beginning with a mock interview with a well-meaning, yet exacting, job-centre supervisor, the feature allows us to glimpse Robin over the course of a year working at an assisted-living facility, a carpentry gig and, finally, a pharmaceuticals lab, punctuated by more relaxed social occasions. Nilsson and editor Anna Meller assemble these sequences with a deliberate sense of disorientation, with Robin’s successive job changes, and hairstyle shifts, coming across as an apt variation on Denis Lavant’s character in Leos Carax’s Holy Motors. With Nilsson working as his own cinematographer, his cooly composed and eerie frames also engender a sense of flux, the movie’s form conveying a mind over-sensitised to changing stimuli, which is what Robin’s is confronted by in each scene.

It’s true to neurodiversity that there’s diversity within it, and whilst Robin’s life shows plausible obstacles coming before him, there’s always ambiguity about what might be a challenging social or emotional situation for anyone, or if the film is sometimes suggesting that issues like these exclusively affect autistic people. The motif of constant learning and revision is foregrounded: we see Robin and another autistic character, Cam (non-binary performer Robbie Bellekom), speaking of practising potential social interactions or recording themselves acting one out to “demo” them before they happen. What’s most convincing in all of these sensitive probes of the autistic experience is in showing a neurodiverse brain’s uncertainty about reading moments of reciprocation and humour from others; these triggers aren’t so much misread, as always unstable, as well as shifting at every stage of life whilst one matures, with previous social experiences counting for little.

The film concludes in a meta-fictional way, with a group discussion and improvisation with all of the characters we’ve seen – apart, oddly, from Lincoln Conway, the actor playing Robin’s father. This closing segment, which also incorporates dance choreography (a previous specialism of Nilsson’s multimedia work), is marginally less successful than the ordinary dramatic sequences, with its air of self-consciousness and its vision of the autistic trait of “stimming” being adapted into more graceful, physical movement. Nevertheless, this is one of the most original British debuts of the year and a rigorous engagement with neurodiverse existence that younger audiences will enjoy seeing themselves in, with no heavy-handed coercion to do so, or pathologisation, from the filmmakers.

Masc is a UK production staged by Bertil Nilsson’s own company, Duktiga.