JUST as last month’s more optimistic The Hate U Give felt like it was an essential movie for our time, this incendiary, no-holds-barred film feels like it has been birthed, blood-covered and scream-ing, from the era in which we live.

This perpetually ticked-off film asks the question: what happens when everyone’s privacy is spread out into the open?

Specifically, it zeroes in on the small, prototypically suburban American town of Salem (the self-same town famous for hanging witches) and the explosive results of a malicious hack that lets everyone in on the private emails, messages and photos of everyone else in town.

READ MORE: The Girl In The Spider's Web review

It starts with a series of on-screen promises of the horrors to come (murder, sexism, bullying, toxic masculinity) and the mayor publicly killing himself because pictures of his young daughter in the bathtub gets him instantly branded a paedophile, and it only gets crazier from there.

Lily (Odessa Young) and her Mean Girls-esque group of best friends Bex (Hari Nef), Sarah (Suki Waterhouse) and Em (Abra) at first believe that everyone is fair game in this society where privacy no longer applies.

But, not long after Lily’s secret relationship with her 40-something married husband neighbour (Joel McHale) is laid bare via explicit photos and texts, the group find themselves targets of the town’s angry population when the nefarious hacker turns the spotlight of suspicion on them.

Sitting somewhere between Spring Breakers, Heathers and The Purge, with a pinch of social media daredevil thriller Nerve, writer-director Sam Levinson’s film feels designed to push buttons and stoke the fires of conversation – some primed and ready to take centre stage, others you might not even realise were there lurking.

There are morality plays and social commentary about our knee-jerk reaction era, the privacy-upholding world of decades past clashing with the perceived “privacy is dead” world of today and particularly Trump’s second-amendment-rights-above-all-else America.

Those thematically rewarding aspects are woven in and pulse with passion through a film that never forgets to be hugely entertaining while simultaneously forcing us to confront why we’re finding it enjoyable – for instance the violence is as uncomfortable in its nihilistic flippancy as it is plentiful and inventively staged.

It’s awash with sharp dialogue delivered by a cast that fit their characters perfectly – the key group feel at once like a commentary on the archetypal high school girls often portrayed in movies and cathartic heroines in their own right.

Despite the heightened, society-gone-made world they inhabit, there’s something strangely real about the film.

Is it really so hard to believe a small town would descend into chaos like this, with a spark of outrage striking in an already divided climate? It never holds back in ferociously making its points, forcing you to sit back and think in the process.