Every time a British film comes out which isn't appalling, the critics go wild for it. London to Brighton is no exception - the Independent has already sung its praise and the Guardian has declared it the British film of the year. This time, though, there's some justification for it. This is an excellent effort for a debut, and while its budget (minimal) and length (85 minutes) make it feel more like a BBC television drama than a feature film it's well worth the price of entry.

It's also difficult to discuss without throwing spoilers out. If you are allergic to plot details (and endings) in your film reviews, look away now.

There's nothing cool about being a pimp

Like the last three films I reviewed here, this one is about a young girl in trouble. (Filmmakers love that kind of thing.) Specifically, it's about Joanne, a 12-year-old runaway, Kelly, an aging prostitute, and Derek, Kelly's pimp. Gangland London isn't the cheerful mockney wonderland that Guy Ritchie and a million wretched imitators plied us with eight years ago; it's a hellhole full of people who make their living out of other people's misery. As the film unfolds, we are told in flashback how Derek convinced Kelly to go and procure Joanne for him, and of how he then convinces Joanne to visit Duncan Allen, an aging pedophile. Needless to say, things don't go to plan: Duncan ends up dying, and Stuart Allen, his son (and, it is implied, a crime boss to be reckoned with) forces Derek and Chum (Derek's cowardly, gormless accomplice) to go and find the Kelly and Joanne, who have fled to Brighton.

So far, so grim. This is precisely the sort of social realist drama which television used to churn out regularly in the 1970s and 1980s, although it's a well-done example of it. It's hard to watch this, the bleakest moment being when Derek and Chum take the girls to a rendezvous with Stuart Allen and are ordered to start digging graves. The film saves itself from being an utter downer, however, when Stuart Allen reveals his real motives. By the end of the film, Derek and Chum are dead and buried, Kelly is back on the streets - though free of Derek's influence - and Joanne has gone to live with her grandmother in a sweet little cottage in the countryside.

This doesn't happen in a trite or easy manner. In the film's central confrontation, Stuart interrogates Joanne and demands to know exactly what happened between her and his father, interspersing the conversation with anecdotes about his father's cruelty. He also forces her to pull the trigger on Derek, making the whole affair not just a matter of revenge, but a bizarre form of therapy for both Joanne and Stuart. Stuart is particularly interested in whether Joanne was actually raped by his father (she hadn't - Kelly interrupted them); it seems to be important to him that Joanne is innocent and unspoiled in every possible sense, reinforcing the idea that he's doling out a particularly Old Testament style of justice.

There are few surprises in this film. The "she kills the bloke's dad" angle is laid out for us early on, and none of the four people I was with failed to see the final twist coming. But Williams does make you doubt your guesses at every turn, and in the end it isn't about the plot twists - it's about four poor sinners being judged and found guilty or innocent. All the main characters in this film are judged, and punished and rewarded based on what they did onscreen. Joanne, being innocent in every respect, gets a second change. Derek and Chum die - Derek for procuring children for a pedophile, and Chum for stupidly going along with Derek's relentless pursuit of the girls. Kelly gets a half-reprieve for intervening when Duncan Allen was about to hurt Joanne, but only a half-reprieve - she was still willing to procure an underage girl for 200, after all - and ends up no better or worse off than she was at the beginning. While we are fully aware that Stuart is a gangster, the script carefully avoids showing him doing anything illegal (other than dishing out his blend of vigilante justice and shock therapy) - to do so would undermine his position as the film's agent of justice. Gangster movies tend to exist in a world where the police are curiously absent, and this convention is used to the film's advantage (again, it would undermine Stuart's role if there was a conflicting form of justice present).

Williams even manages to avoid the obvious ploy of having Joanne make it to her grandmother's cottage only to find that the old woman has died. It's the restraint showed by the director, and the avoidance of all the tempting tricks and cop-outs that films like this indulge in, which makes London to Brighton a worthy debut. Someone give the man a budget.