Starring Lorraine Stanley and Johnny Harris. Unrated. Plays Wednesday, April 2, to Wednesday, April 9, at the Vancity Theatre

British crime dramas have always been grittier than their U.S. counterparts, but even by Blighty’s gloss-free standards, London to Brighton is an almost neorealistic piece of work. Although the chronology is somewhat complex, the plot is very simple. An old prostitute named Kelly (not so old, really; it’s just that the street has put more years on her clock than has Father Time) takes pity on 12-year-old runaway Joanne (Georgia Groome), and the two of them do something nasty to a perverted old crime lord. Although the world is better off without their victim, and little love is lost between this cruel bastard and his ice-cold son, underworld values demand that justice be done (which is to say that vengeance will be bloodily exacted). Thus, a skinhead pimp (Johnny Harris) is set on the trail of the penniless fugitives, and not to offer them tea and bickies, either.

Writer-director Paul Andrew Williams strips things down to the basics, and his emotional palette is chillingly bleak. Like an old-time practitioner of Soviet typage, he makes sure that his actors look exactly like the characters they are expected to portray and that virtually everyone is motivated by fear. When better impulses do emerge (as they do in streetwise Kelly, played to unsentimental perfection by Lorraine Stanley), they are so unexpected that it’s almost as if they flew in from another planet.

Nevertheless, it is these human touches that make London to Brighton as emotionally affecting as it is tense and suspenseful.