Australian writer-director John V. Soto's The Reckoning is an intriguing, overwrought thriller that interweaves two accounts of guilt and revelation.

After an enigmatic opening involving images of two young women – we later learn where these images come from – the film seems to morph into a straightforward police procedural involving an edgy, jaded cop, Robbie Green (Jonathan LaPaglia), who is investigating the death of his close friend and colleague, Jason Pearson (Luke Hemsworth), found shot in his car.

As Green and his partner, Jane Lambert (Viva Bianca), search the crime scene, Green finds a video card. This discovery works in two ways: it drives the film, and it sends the police on an investigation, following in the footsteps of the people who made it. The footage is a record of the past, and a gesture towards the future; a source of clues to Pearson's death, and the reasons behind it.

It depicts a mysterious mission that involves two missing teenagers, Rachel and AJ (Hanna Mangan Lawrence and Alex Williams), who are on a quest for retribution. They have brought a camera with them: the jagged, truncated, fragmented images they capture are evidence and narrative.

There are times, as the story unfolds, when it seems a little unlikely that these two people could film what they filmed, gain access to the places and subjects with a camera in their hand; at this point, the images feel more like testimonies to their frantic, vengeful frame of mind as much as hard and fast documentary footage. Similarly, the pair's physical strength sometimes seems no match for the people they are up against.

But Rachel seems to be inspired by young women like Zoe Tamerlis's character in Abel Ferrara's Ms 45, channelling a desire for retribution that gives them almost uncanny powers.

Meanwhile, Green – whose relationship with his late friend turns out to have soured – balances tensions between home and work, his partner and his wife; the closer he gets to the elusive pair, the more rattled he seems to become.

Writer-director Soto moves deftly between narrative registers; he handles the action confidently, and his cast perform with conviction. It's a heightened work whose occasional implausibilities are swiftly absorbed by the hectic energy of the storytelling.