Two brothers return to their small home town in the Midlands to confront a horror in their past. Like Phoenix Nights meets Get Carter, the first half of the film is peppered with slapstick Northern humour, which catches you off guard when set against the dark themes and general atmosphere of brooding menace.

As with all the best revenge yarns, there is a powerfull sense of inevitability. It is there from the opening scenes of the brothers trudging through forests and over fields, neither stopping, nor speaking to each other. The characters seem aware of this inevitability and on some level feel they deserve what's coming to them. There is a definite Western feel to the film, with two mysterious strangers drifting into a Midlands village that seems as remote and isolated as any frontier town.

The older brother Richard (Paddy Considine) has the far-away stare and brooding presence of a man weighed down by guilt and pain. He wears the same green army issue jacket throughout, which takes on the manifestation of revenge. As he himself says, after leaving a trail of savagery in his wake, "Now I have become the monster."

The sacrifice of his humanity becomes the central theme. His jacket feels almost as iconic as Clint Eastwood's poncho in A Fist Full Of Dollars. The bad guys, although quite comical, fit the Wild West mould of thuggish gangsters, bullying the weak, particularly Sonny (Gary Stretch), who has the twisted smile and sinister good looks of a classic villian.

As in director Shane Meadows's earlier work, there is a good deal of improvised dialogue flying about, which gives the film a rawness that I really liked. It makes the characters more authentic and the violence more shocking.

The acting is superb, with Considine particularly impressive. His grim determination to the bloody task is convincingly portrayed and his intensity is mesmerising. Despite the occasional moments of laugh-out-load comedy, this is a very dark journey indeed, dealing with issues of sexual abuse, drugs and violence.

Apart from a slightly predictable twist towards the end, I can find little to fault. Dead Man's Shoes is a brilliant and disturbing journey to the dark side of brotherly love.