Reviewing Festen without revealing the elephant in the room around which the plot twists is like reviewing a restaurant and rating only the cutlery.

This is a darkly comic thriller with a disturbing sexual storyline.

A stage adaptation of Thomas Vinterberg's Danish movie of the same name - the title translating as The Celebration - the film centres around Helge's 60th birthday party, where wayward sons and daughters arrive to celebrate their father's landmark year with a banquet, formal speeches and traditional family songs.

Sounds lovely, unless your family has been concealing a dark secret for more than 30 years.

Winning Best Foreign Language Picture at Cannes, the movie adhered to the Dogme principles of film-making, invented by Vinterberg and Lars von Trier in 1995.

Dogme is all about stripping a movie back to plot and characters, banning extraneous props, shooting on anything but hand-held cameras and music added in the editing suite.

It's a manifesto which translates to the stage easily - Dogme isn't about over-the-top action and fast cuts.

Director Rufus Norris has been clever to tame the roving eye of the camera, resetting scenes which wander in and out of the siblings' bedrooms to a single stage set where multiple plot lines flit around each other.

That's not to say Rufus has stuck to the Dogme principles - and why should he? But the repetitive, little-girl laughter could be swapped for a giant sign reading "lost innocence".

If you've got tickets, it's time to stop reading as plot spoilers lie ahead. The story pivots on model son Christian's lurid speech revealing that his father used to sexually abuse him and his sister, who recently committed suicide. Rupert Frazer hits just the right note as the conservative patriarch hanging onto his happy family image. Christian Coulson (as son Christian) aims for numbed detachment but seems too young, his face too unfurrowed, to quite deliver the required gravitas.

Nevertheless, a tense and vital thriller which celebrates this amazing movie while adding its own sinister touches.

Showing until Saturday, box office 08700 606 650