'Dirty Pretty Things' is all about the London criminal underground, but far from being yet another Cockney geezers-with-guns flick, instead it offers a rare glimpse into the world of 'the people you never see' - the illegal immigrants and asylum seekers who pass invisibly through London life as hotel cleaners, hospital porters and sweatshop workers. Such characters normally appear, if at all, only in the background of movies, but in 'Dirty Pretty Things', director Stephen Frears has inverted this cinematic norm, presenting a complex multiethnic subculture, and it is the Anglo Saxon characters who are confined to the periphery.

Chiwetel Ejiofor stars as Okwe, a doctor who has fled his native Nigeria for Britain, living illegally on the couch of Turkish asylum seeker Senay, and working off the books as a minicab driver and as concierge at a hotel. There one night he is called to unblock a room's toilet, only to find in the S-bend a human heart, in perhaps the most striking visual metaphor for life gone down the drain since Renton dived after his drugs in 'Trainspotting'.

What Okwe has discovered is a horrific criminal scheme, where organs are exchanged for false passports; and while his own illegal status prevents him from going to the police, Okwe soon finds that everything, including his own professional training as a doctor, has a price in a community whose members are desperate to conceal their pasts and to construct new identities for themselves.

It is the mark of a good thriller that as a specific crime is uncovered, a much more generalised injustice is also exposed - and in the case of 'Dirty Pretty Things', that injustice is the way in which people who just want to be welcomed by this country end up being criminalised, dehumanised and exploited by it. At its heart, this film contains a very bitter message, even if it is sugared somewhat by a neat - to my mind too neat - resolution, and by a romantic development between Okwe and Senay (for which role Frears has shrewdly cast Audrey Tautou, recently popularised by 'Amelie').

See this, and learn the true value of a British passport.

Anton Bitel, 19.12.02