PARED-DOWN and brutally effective, Dead Man’s Shoes is the director Shane Meadows most commanding film to date. In common with his previous picture, Once Upon a Time in the Midlands, this movie takes its narrative cue from America. Both make reference to Anthony Mann’s classic westerns, featuring the iconic image of a stranger striding into town and creating merry hell for the folk who live there.

But while Once Upon a Time runs with the western theme, turning into a good-natured pastiche of the genre, Dead Man’s Shoes takes a darker route. In many ways it is closer to Sam Peckinpah’s relentless Straw Dogs than to the westerns with their clear-cut black and white honour codes.

But while the influence of 1970s American cinema is evident, this is ultimately a very British production. The locations are a blend of scenic English pastoral landscapes and the kind of provincial towns where poverty, unemployment and boredom gradually dehumanise, where suburban myths about pack mentality and unspeakable cruelty circulate.

It is just such cruelty that brings Richard (Paddy Considine, who also co-wrote the film) back to his hometown after seven years in the Army. He is shadowed by his handicapped younger brother Anthony (an impressive Toby Kebbell), whose shoulders hunch in concentration as he tries to match Richard’s steps.

Simple, vulnerable Anthony fell in with the local drugs supplier and his cohorts after Richard left to join the Army, serving as their dogsbody and the butt of their increasingly savage jokes. Grainy flashbacks unfold throughout the film, offering glimpses of the treatment that Richard has returned to avenge. But the uncomfortable shots of a frightened and freaked out Anthony being bullied into taking another hit on a bong are at first mitigated by Meadows’s characteristic humour. The dealer and his four goons trying to be big men while crammed into a Citroën 2CV is an image so hilariously pathetic that you almost feel sorry for them.

They are helpless and ineffectual as Richard, armed with military training and unquenchable hatred, plays with their minds. He writes the words “Cheyne Stoking” in spray paint on the wall of their flat. It refers to the pattern of breathing that a terminal patient adopts when his organs are shutting down and he is about to pass away. Death, at this point, is unavoidable. And while the men are more concerned about a package of missing drugs and probably think that Cheyne Stoking is somewhere near Stoke-on-Trent, on some instinctive animal level they have grasped their fate.

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