SCOTTISH stars and directors took over the Glasgow Film Festival at the weekend in an orgy of drunken mayhem, chips, hitmen singing cheesy classics and love triumphing over hate. Fortunately, all such action was confined to the films.

The prize for most misleading title went to Karen Gillan’s The Party’s Just Beginning (**), which had its world premiere at the Glasgow Film Theatre on Saturday night. Written and directed by the former Doctor Who and current Jumanji star, this Inverness-set drama began bleakly with supermarket worker Lucy (Gillan, also starring), seizing the microphone in her local pub for a boozy rant at the world. Lucy cannot seem to find comfort in anything or anyone, even the handsome, nameless Londoner who rocks up in town seeking a laugh and nothing more. Just to make her loss and loneliness worse, it is Christmas.

Gillan certainly has the eye of a natural born director, conjuring some clever shots from very little. She does particularly well in making the most of a wintry Inverness, using the river and the Christmas lights to call to mind It’s a Wonderful Life’s Bedford Falls, and she has chosen a fine supporting cast that includes Paul Higgins and Siobhan Redmond.

Where the film falls down is in the one-note, relentlessly bleak story, with even the better lines struggling to pierce the gloom. Luckily, Gillan the actor comes to the aid of Gillan the writer before the entire film sinks into a pit of its own misery.

From her coming of age feature debut Ratcatcher to 2011’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, Glasgow-born director Lynne Ramsay has gone her own distinctive way as a filmmaker, with results that are always arresting. You Were Never Really Here (***) is the tale of a Taxi Driver-style avenging angel (Joaquin Phoenix) who rescues girls from sex traffickers. Despite the heavyweight subject matter and Phoenix’s burn-up-the-screen performance, Ramsay’s drama feels insubstantial and lacking a point. But it has an impressive style and swagger that is all its own, and the Phoenix-Ramsay combo is one I would definitely like to see again. It takes a big talent to get the most from the likes of Phoenix and, in We Need to Talk About Kevin, Tilda Swinton, and Ramsay has it.

You, Me and Him (**) stars a trio of well kent TV faces in David Tennant, Lucy Punch (leader of the yummy mummies Motherland) and Faye Marsay (Alex Godman’s sister Katya in McMafia). For a long stretch of its 98-minute runtime, Daisy Aitken’s tale bubbles along like a competent if wildly unconvincing midweek ITV comedy drama about a couple, Olivia and Alex (Marsay and Punch) coming to a crossroads in their relationship. On hand offering nothing in the way of helpful advice is newly divorced neighbour John (Tennant). Even if You, Me and Him had been written by a team of Oscar-winning screenwriters, no picture could recover from the horribly ill-advised hand-brake turn the story takes part way through.

It only takes a minute of James McAvoy appearing on screen to remind you why the Glasgow-born actor is such a hit with audiences and directors, art house and blockbuster, alike. In Submergence (***) star of X-Men and Atonement is teamed with Oscar-winning Alicia Vikander in a curious blend of hostage drama and love story from Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire director Wim Wenders.

Dani (Vikander) is a marine scientist. James (McAvoy) is, on the surface, a water engineer working in the developed world but in reality he is a spy. Getting a sense of hidden depths yet? If not, Wenders has plenty more of where that came from as the couple part on their respective missions, she to Greenland for research and he to Africa, where he is promptly kidnapped by jihadists. Denied contact with each other, Dani and James seek solace in memories of when they first met.

Waiting for the two stories to play out means the film ambles in at just under two hours, and the pace is punishingly sluggish in parts. Of the two leads, Vikander gets the worst deal with dialogue that sounds as though she is reading from a science textbook most of the time, and a storyline that demands little of her but to look mournful as she tries and fails to reach James. McAvoy, meanwhile, shines as the agent who soon realises he is in over his head.

[ITALS] Festival runs till March 4. Programme and tickets: glasgowfilm.org/festival