The fest has barely begun, and three films already stand out as upsetting and sometimes arresting portraits of young men struggling against various hurdles: existential uncertainty, domineering parents, mental illness, and ultimately themselves. What does it take to be a man? According to these films, the answer is quite a lot, and often more than the characters portrayed are able (or willing) to give.

The pain of trying to find oneself in the world at the pivotal stage of becoming an adult is hardly new territory, but in Gabriel, a new film starring the talented Rory Culkin, the journey is seen through the eyes of a mentally unstable young man lost in his own black and white worldview. Confronted with life and his family after suffering an unseen breakdown, the film opens with Gabriel reluctantly returning home from a rehabilitation clinic, while searching for long lost (ex) girlfriend Alice. Alice is Gabriel’s answer, his key to survival, next to which everything fades and falls away. Culkin brings his character’s obsessive thought patterns to life with subtlety and a quiet foreboding that make the film very engrossing, and his relationship with his mother (the excellent Deirdre O’Connell) especially brings to light the difficult truth that sometimes, simply loving a troubled family member can end up doing more harm than good.

Beneath the Harvest Sky is perhaps the least successful of these three brooding films, largely because of the script’s failure to bestow any sympathy to main character Casper, played with unabashed swagger by Emory Cohen (Smash, The Place Beyond the Pines). Here we have a hotshot kid in a small Maine town around the time of the big annual potato harvest, who is nowhere to be found on the fields; unlike all his friends working the harvest, Casper gets involved in smuggling drugs over the border for his deadbeat outlaw father. Casper is very much still a little boy in the film, with a hubris that goes unchecked and barely a conception of the outcome of his actions. And the unfortunate thing is, at the film’s conclusion he does not seem to have changed much or grown up in the slightest.

And then there is Starred Up, the best and most effective of this bunch, and by far the most troubling. Sort of like the anti-Orange is the New Black, this unforgiving and very dark portrait of prison life centers on Eric Love (Jack O’Connell, of TV’s Skins), a young criminal who transfers to an adult prison where his father (Ben Mendelsohn) is also incarcerated. The vital difference with this film is, as fierce and dangerous a creature as Eric is, as prideful and angry as he can sometimes be, we also see his hurt all too clearly, as well as the person who did the hurting. The suffocating and monumentally abusive relationship between father and son here is a source of hopelessness in the film, but Starred Up succeeds as an examination into the base animalistic side of the male psyche. In this prison, being a man is the toughest struggle of all.