Outlanders

Another exploration of the illegal-immigrant experience in London, director Dominic Lees’s sorrowing thriller follows Jakub Tolak’s Adam from the depressed Polish port of Gdansk to the building sites of east London in search of his older brother (Przemyslaw Sadowski), a one-time soccer prospect now knee-deep in ‘lump’ labour corruption. The movie’s location manager should get a credit, but Lees’s directorial touch is too rough and some of his technical set-ups too awkward and raw for his film to work either as a story of a disillusioning sentimental education or as gritty, urban thriller.  Some of Adam Jeppesen’s cinematography is seductive – lonely estuarine wastelands – but the script (by Lees and Jimmy Gardner) is just too cursory to provide any meaty material for the actors to sink their teeth into.