British film director Mike Leigh (Secrets and Lies, All Or Nothing) has a deep fascination with the unsaid. He likes to shed light on those heavy, silent places in peoples' lives where suffering has been allowed to fester like a fungus in the shade. In illuminating these recesses, he reminds us that lives are lived on many levels, and gives us a sensitive understanding of what it is to be human. It's what makes his films paradoxically utterly depressing and uplifting at the same time.

Vera Drake is Leigh doing what he does best. He is in similar territory to previous films Secrets and Lies and All Or Nothing, focusing on an ordinary working class family pulling together. The setting is 1950s London. The war is still a recent memory, food rationing continues to be a part of daily life and the upper lip is still stiff. Times are not easy, but there's a jaunty, cockney cheeriness in the cramped Drake household when the family of four return home from work each day.

Vera (Imedla Staunton), the perky, little mum of the title, is constantly on the go. When she's not on her hands and knees scrubbing the homes of the well-to-do, she's going door to door bucking up the poorly, brewing up cuppas, or putting the dinner on the table for her mechanic husband George, and grown-up children, Sid and Ethel. As Frank, George's brother and boss, says to him one day, "She's got an 'art of gold."

There's nothing to suggest otherwise even when, out of generosity of spirit, we see Vera performing abortions. The staunchly stoical Vera would never use that word: "I help girls out," she says. But Vera's chirpy cheerfulness cannot disguise the seriousness of her vocation. This being the Fifties, abortion being illegal, and Vera being a simple cleaning lady, her methods are decidedly primitive. It involves pumping soapy water into the womb, so that the foetus is flushed out hours later. The process seems like a disaster waiting to happen and, sure enough, when a girl gets an infected womb the cops come knocking.

Leigh is at pains to show that young working class women looking to terminate an unwanted pregnancy had little choice at the time. Both Vera and her girls are victims of society's myopia. The naive, but well-intentioned Vera is in stark contrast to her friend Lily, who brings new girls to her and secretly charges them a fee for something that Vera would do for free.

Vera Drake is sure to stir debate, but this is more than just an issue film. It's a moving portrait of how a family falls apart and then rallies together after Vera's secret is painfully forced into the open. Vera's sister-in-law, the brazen, upwardly mobile harridan (Heather Craney) wants to immediately cut off all relations. Vera's son (Daniel Mays), a dapper, confident lad, reacts with anger and revulsion. But on the other side, Vera's painfully shy daughter (Alex Kelly), and her romantic interest, the lugubrious neighbour Reg, are quietly supportive. Vera's husband Stan (Phil Davis) is patient, loving - a pillar of strength.

As with other Mike Leigh films, characters are subtly drawn and deeply felt. Even the chief copper (Peter Wright), who arrests Vera, is sympathetic while firm.

The ensemble cast deliver memorable performances. Staunton, in particular, gives a stunningly, moving performance, as the full weight of the law comes to bear on her in the second part of the film. At the end, what lingers is not so much about the question of the morality of Vera's actions, but an image of a small, good-natured woman crushed by an indifferent system.