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“There are just some people who should never reproduce,” says a curtain-twitching busybody about one of her neighbors in a drab housing estate in Harlow, England. It’s the kind of smug, ugly line all too often used to demean underprivileged families in Britain’s raging, ceaseless class battle — though in Fyzal Boulifa’s darkly perceptive suburban drama “Lynn + Lucy,” it’s a casual shot fired in an especially unhappy case of internal working-class warfare. Toughly updating an age-old strain of gossip-fueled neighborhood morality play, this story of female friendship undone by domestic tragedy plays as a kind of Sirkian melodrama for the Daily Mail age of tabloid hysteria — altogether an audacious, promise-confirming feature debut for Boulifa, whose shorts “Rate Me” and “The Curse” both took top honors in Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes.

The involvement of Ken Loach’s Sixteen Films as a producing partner may lead some viewers to...