From its synopsis, Mr In-Between might easily be mistaken for more of the same from the sausage factory of British cinema. The prospect of yet another low-budget thriller set in London gangland and interested only in viscera, stage-blood and the fetishisation of men who kill for a living would surely be unendurable. Mercifully, Paul Sarossy’s film proves very different – brittle, surprising, filled with unexpected beauty. First-time director Sarossy, better known as a cinematographer, has worked extensively with Atom Egoyan and shares with his mentor a painterly eye for composition – the film’s every shot, meticulously balanced and framed, seems to consciously mimic the just-so perfection of its hero’s neatly ordered life.

So painstaking an approach could easily result in a sense of airless precision but Sarossy tempers this tendency towards the hermetically-sealed by locating the raw and remarkable amongst the mundane and everyday. Stark, leaveless winter trees open the film and at its conclusion find their mirror image in the skeletal hulk of a seaside pier; hundreds of starlings flock together, staining the sky black; the cliffs of Dover, shorn of their picture postcard familiarity, become fearful signifiers of death and self-destruction. Such moments typify Sarossy’s style – like Egoyan in Felicia’s Journey he has succeeded in bringing an intensely art-house sensibility to material that in lesser hands might seem merely sensationalist. Two very different worlds jostle for our attention in Mr In-Between: the first, inhabited by Andy and Cathy, is one of sink estates, dole money and cash-in-hand labour – life at the fag end of the welfare state, captured with all the grimy verisimilitude of a Mike Leigh picture. The other is a far stranger place, stuffed full with psychopaths, gangsters and guns for hire – not the cool wisecrackers popularised by Tarantino and Ritchie but men from a London seemingly designed by Hieronymous Bosch and rich in gothic flourishes and unabashed melodrama.

Here David Calder’s Tattooed Man, the mandarin of some multi-tentacled syndicate of crime, crouches in stygian shadow, surrounded by dead animals and his grotesque associates – Clive Russell as an albino policeman, corrupt and utterly depraved; Saeed Jaffrey as a diminutive sadist who lives to administer death by lethal injection.

It is the interaction between these worlds – at first deliciously incongruous, then increasingly alarming – which lends the film its terrible, tragic momentum. Andrew Howard’s antiheroic Jon is the link between the two and as he becomes torn between them he emerges as the eponymous Mr In-Between. Adeptly, Howard charts Jon’s transformation from dead-eyed killer to tortured, latter-day Raskolnikov and back again, making this serial murderer successfully sympathetic but he inevitably spends much of his time playing straight man to Calder’s kingpin.

Calder’s is a great, ferocious, meaty slab of a performance – he plays The Tattooed Man like a cross between Aleister Crowley and Mother from The Avengers, relishing his existence beneath the city and outside its rules, as happy torturing some unhappy victim as he is cooking Sunday roast in his pinney or thundering a quotation from Nietzsche.

At times, the preponderance of familiar TV faces – Clive Russell, Mark Benton, a cameo from egregious comedienne Gina Yashere – threaten to lend the piece the air of a television drama gone awol from the schedules, but the studied, superior gloss granted it by Sarossy (on what must surely have been a meagre budget) more than justifies its position on the big screen. Unique amongst the dreary parade of British crime cinema, it is only to be hoped that its unexpected nature – as well as its deliberately dispiriting conclusion – do not rob this brave, potent film of the attention and approbation it deserves.

Jonathan Barnes