Catch Me Daddy, film review: Wolfe brothers' tense debut cuts straight to the chase

(15) Dir. Daniel Wolfe; Starring Sameena Jabeen Ahmed, Connor McCarron, 112mins

In bare outline, Daniel and Matthew Wolfe's debut feature is a tense, ripped-from-the-headlines thriller about "honour killings", in which a luckless young couple spend a night being chased through a West Yorkshire town and the surrounding moorland by two car-loads of paid thugs paid at the behest of the girl's father.

But Catch Me Daddy is at the same time so lyrical and so unsparing that it becomes something more than just a genre film; something more like a poetic-realist fugue and a despairing howl at the state of contemporary Britain.

Filmed by Robbie Ryan, the cinematographer who shot all of Andrea Arnold's films and some of Ken Loach's, and who is an expert at painting with available light, it finds some moments of warmth in the otherwise pretty bleak lives of British-Pakistani teenager Laila and her white Scottish boyfriend Aaron, who have run away and cocooned themselves in a static caravan fuggy with dope smoke and pop music. But then the night closes in, the thugs catch up with them, and there doesn't seem to be anywhere to run to.

Newcomer Sameena Jabeen Ahmed gives a terrifically natural performance as pink-haired and playful Laila, who starts the film so fresh-faced and headstrong. By the end, she seems half-catatonic and disassociated, as if all that's left inside her is a single circulating thought: "How can this be happening?"