Two directors follow up their promising debuts - with varying results Garage (18) dir: Lenny Abrahamson The Cottage (18) dir: Paul Andrew Williams

Call it what you like - the sophomore curse or "difficult second film syndrome" - but it can't be easy following up a glowingly received debut. The miraculous first film, materialising on screen in a cloud of fairy dust, is a romantic idea, but second features are another matter. It is unusual for a Citizen Kane to be followed by a Magnificent Ambersons, and not every Badlands begets a Days of Heaven. Both the 41-year-old Irish director Lenny Abrahamson and the 34-year-old Englishman Paul Andrew Williams made hugely original and arresting debuts. Their second films provide signs of whether they are destined for greatness, the bargain bin or somewhere in between.

Abrahamson's first picture, Adam and Paul, was a Beckettian comedy about junkies trawling Dublin for a fix. Out of this crummy milieu, Abrahamson coaxed bursts of bleary comedy and gentle poetry that left you feeling elated. His new film, Garage, achieves a similar effect with trickier material. Josie (Pat Shortt), a middle-aged loner with learning difficulties, mans a small-town petrol station. He wears an Australian baseball cap, but the closest he has ever come to leaving Ireland is the time he once almost went to Ipswich.

Josie describes the premises as a "valet garage", which means only that it doesn't go in for all that self-service malarkey, and he spends his days repositioning the Castrol GTX rack as though hanging an Old Master. For all his talk of passing trade, business is slow, and it's an open secret that his employer is planning to raze the garage and build apartments on the site.

This is primarily a character study of a man responding awkwardly to the threat of change, with the mildest movement in the plot sending disruptive ripples through the rest of the film. Mark O'Halloran (who also scripted and starred in Adam and Paul) writes in a pared-down style that suggests Pinter with the menace replaced by melancholy, and Abrahamson directs accordingly, zeroing in on the mundane details on which Josie's life hangs.

It is this eye for minutiae that helps keep Garage from lurching into Of Mice and Men territory; even when Josie starts to unravel, the film doesn't lose sight of his dread at what the neighbours might think, or the vital part played in his life by cuppas and chocolate bickies. One of the last scenes, in which he tries to make a mug of tea with milk that is past its best, is a gem of understated sadness that partly excuses the cop-out ending.

That's Abrahamson out of the woods. But what of Williams? His horror-comedy The Cottage (out on 14 March) was originally intended as his debut, until it became clear that no one would fund a project of uncertain genre, full of complicated special effects. Instead, Williams made the ferocious thriller London to Brighton, and is only now putting The Cottage on the market after the other film's success. Two thugs - the snarling David (Andy Serkis) and his weedy brother Peter (Reece Shearsmith) - kidnap Tracey (Jennifer Ellison), daughter of a crime kingpin, and hold her at a rural bolt-hole while they await the ransom. What they haven't banked on is losing the upper hand so soon, first to the volatile Tracey, who has no intention of playing the hostage, and then to the sinister presence lurking in the forest.

When the violence comes, it is enthusiastically gory: I'd never before seen a head split in half with a shovel, but then I've led a sheltered life. The trouble with The Cottage, as with so many horror-comedies, is that it is neither frightening nor funny. And Shearsmith is far from muscular enough to shoulder what little emotional content the picture supplies. Williams deserves top marks for showing his range, but he doesn't entirely stave off the sophomore curse. Even at its most technically accomplished, his film never loses a certain aura of pointlessness. Like Josie's milk, it's on the turn.

Pick of the week

Diary of the Dead (18)
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The Edge of Heaven (15)
dir: Fatih Akin
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Four Minutes (15)
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A young female convict takes piano lessons. Don’t mention Prisoner: Cell Block H.

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