As a rule, it's impossible to make a film in secret in a country as small as this. The tortuous process of putting together the financial package for a feature film can take years, and there's very little tradition here of shooting no-budget features, so there's usually plenty of advance warning of impending releases. When John Carney and Tom Hall turned up out of the blue at the 1996 Cork Film Festival, therefore, with their stylish, remarkably accomplished debut feature, November Afternoon, heads turned in some surprise.

The following year, Carney and Hall went on to make Just in Time, a one-hour television comedy of infidelity, drily dissecting the self-deception of a middle-aged couple (Gerard McSorley and Frances Barber) over the course of a holiday weekend. Just in Time continued November After- noon's concentration on character and performance, but where the earlier film had achieved a rich cinematic texture through adept use of black-and-white video, Just in Time, shot on film, had a lusher, more composed look. The logical next step for the pair, it seemed, would be a conventionally-financed feature film. But instead, they've gone back to basics, shooting their new film, Park, on digital video for a few thousand pounds and completing post-production with the assistance of the Irish Film Board.

"We really wanted to do this after Just in Time, because I felt that we had played it too safe there," says Carney, who writes the scripts, co-directs with Hall, and composes the music. "The pressure of working with a full crew and all its paraphernalia got to us. There are scenes in the film that have loads of potential, but they end up looking like a sitcom. So it seemed like the most appealing thing to do, to take out a bank loan and just do it, and go back to working with a small camera, and a completely tiny crew. The downside of that is that you have to take on all that responsibility of making sure that everything and everyone turns up at the right place at the right time, and coping if they don't."

Carney and Hall began shooting what at first was conceived as a short, 40-minute film, a disturbing black comedy about an encounter in a suburban park between a young girl and a lecherous park warden. "We shot all the park stuff as an experiment, really, and found we had this kind of blackly surreal comedy," says Carney. "And then we decided to change it and broaden it out, with the flashback structure." In the finished film, the story of the encounter, and its grim consequences, is told 10 years later from the perspective of the girl, now a young woman (Claudia Terry), still unable to come to terms with the memory of what the warden (Des Nealon) did to her.

This is delicate subject matter, and Carney is well aware that Park may get a mixed reception. The reaction so far, from women who have seen the film, has been mixed, he says, and he expects that to continue. "I think some may find it objectionable, and others will see it as a mature, cautionary tale."

The strongest and most disturbing part of the film is that original, central sequence, in which Terry and Nealon circle each other against the lush, green backdrop of the park. It's sometimes dreamlike, sometimes terrifying and sometimes quite funny, with Nealon a pathetic, comical but deeply threatening figure.

Like the pair's previous work, Park is that rarity among Irish films, a contemporary drama set in an urban, middle-class milieu. Carney agrees that they seem to go to great pains to set their stories in a Dublin which could just as easily be any other European city. "The second I start to write anything, I start worrying about where it's going to be set. I don't like Irish cinema. Tom and myself are obsessed by the idea that you could show our films with Swedish subtitles, and it wouldn't make any difference."

BUT Carney seems to try harder than most Irish screenwriters to write dialogue that is naturalistic and contemporary. He feels, though, that it's extremely difficult to achieve. "I think it's to do with bad writing. It's really difficult to write a scene with five Dublin characters sitting around chatting. That's all been cornered by Roddy Doyle and beer ads."

With November Afternoon, Just in Time and now Park, Carney and Hall have made more contemporary drama in the space of a few short years than most have done in long careers. All three films explore what goes on beneath the surface of suburban respectability, and the themes - unfaithfulness, incest, child abuse and rape - chime with many Irish concerns of the 1990s without seeming issue-driven. It's interesting that they have taken "no-budget" strategies to explore such subjects (although the Irish Film Board has come in postproduction support on two of the films, and co-financed Just in Time with RTE).

Park was filmed with a digital video camera, and the version to be shown in the festival will be on a 35millimetre film print. Carney is delighted with the quality of the image, and the transfer to film. "It makes it look like a 1970s film, which is great," he says. Like its predecessor, Park may be shot using "guerilla" methods, but Carney's and Hall's aesthetic is a million miles removed from the self-conscious visual brutalism of the Danish Dogma 95 group. "Some of those films will give digital a bad name," he believes. "I can't understand how you can have such a great story as Festen and make such a hames of it. I don't think you can make films as ugly as that and get away with it. It was possible for people like Cassavetes to do that in the 1960s, because they were reacting against this overwhelmingly dominant aesthetic, but I think it's really dated to say you can stick a camera in the middle of a bunch of good actors and just shoot it."

Park, in contrast, is beautifully shot and composed, with long, lingering tracking shots and elegant crane movements, emphasised by Carney's hypnotic orchestral score, "ripped off from Bernard Herrmann", he admits. There is, he acknowledges, a considerable debt to Hitchcock in its construction, although he cites a little-known 1970s exploitation chiller, And Soon the Darkness, as his prime inspiration.

Unusually honest about where he thinks the flaws are in his films, Carney is sure that this is the best thing he and Hall have directed so far. "Park is definitely my favourite of our films," he says. "I know that some bits of it are weak, but there are other parts that are the best things we've done, and that I'm really proud of."

Park will be shown at 8.55 p.m. on Saturday, April 24th in Virgin cinema six