BRITISH film, British film, what has become of British film...?

What a silly question. The fact is, films are still being made in this country, some good, some bad, but most are pretty average. Just like anywhere else.

Mark Evans' creepy psychological thriller - a collaboration between the BBC and Warner Bros that played well at Sundance and thoroughly deserves its cinema release - is very much in the latter category. Well worth a look but don't expect it to change your life.

Ben (Colin Firth, mercifully cropping up in something other than a bumbling rom-com) awakes from a coma after a car crash in which he believes his wife died. Grief-stricken, confused, alienated and haunted by fragments of his shattered memory, he moves into a flat in a barely-converted north London hospital and attempts to put the shards of his life back together.

All the while, the newspapers and TV screens are filled with details about the murder of a famous singer who Ben vaguely knew through his wife Elisa (Naomie Harris). It doesn't exactly help, not least because he had a bit of an obsession with the dead chanteuse, indeed, he may well have stalked her for a while - a suggestion that arouses the interest of Inspector Jackson (Kenneth Cranham).

Meanwhile, Ben's new neighbour Charlotte (Mena Suvari, only partially succeeding in stretching herself) offers friendship, kindness, cups of sugar and a shoulder to cry on. She takes him to a spiritualist (Brenda Fricker) who, unsurprisingly it has to be said, all but completely derails him.

Firth does well to hold the viewers' sympathies against their better judgement and Suvari makes the most of her under-developed part as between them, director Evans and scriptwriter Richard Smith have fashioned a disturbing and uncomfortable portrait of a man surrendering his grip on reality. It's not an easy film to watch - images are flashed across the screen to successfully disrupt and confuse the viewer - and unlike more expensive Hollywood genre flicks the end begs more questions than it answers.

See it at UCI, Odeon