REVIEWED - LONDON TO BRIGHTON:Film critic Michael Dwyerenjoys uniformly fine performances from an unfamiliar cast in this lean, taut thriller.

SET over an eventful 24 hours, London to Brighton makes for gripping cinema as it imaginatively employs a time-shifting structure to unravel a corrosive drama rooted in exploitation, fear and danger.

It begins just after three in the morning, as Kelly (Lorraine Stanley), a 25-year-old prostitute whose face is bruised and swollen, takes refuge in a London public toilet with a terrified 11-year-old girl, Joanne (Georgia Groome), whose features are smeared with tears and mascara.

The title refers to the train journey they take to escape the horrific consequences of events revealed in the movie's astutely effective use of extended flashbacks. Kelly's pimp, Derek (Johnny Harris), has assigned her to locate an underage girl for a sinister paedophile gangster (Alexander Morton), and she finds easy prey in Joanne, a runaway from a violent father, when she spots the girl begging at Waterloo Station.

In a remarkably mature and assured first feature film as writer and director, former actor Paul Andrew Williams grounds his disturbing thriller in the tough British realist cinema tradition of Ken Loach and Mike Leigh, which has been sustained in the challenging psychodramas of a younger generation - principally, Shane Meadows (Dead Man's Shoes) and Andrea Arnold (Red Road) - and on television in Prime Suspect.

London to Brighton is worlds away from the self-conscious post-Lock, Stock cycle of Mockney guns'n'geezers yarns. In its grimly deglamorised depiction of a criminal milieu, it is much closer in form and content to the classic Get Carter and, when Kelly's previously untapped maternal instincts respond to Joanne's plight, to the gutsy John Cassavetes movie, Gloria.

Williams establishes precisely etched characters through the uniformly fine performances he elicits from an unfamiliar cast, in which Stanley is outstanding as Kelly, a reluctant heroine who is physically and emotionally scarred, and forced by circumstances to act after years of passively surrendering to being used. This lean, taut thriller is as bleak as its essential honesty demands, but not entirely without hope.