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Slapstick suicide and brooding melodrama crash into each other with pleasing results in this ambitious Britcom about the dreams and dilemmas of a world-weary tube driver. The Office’s Mackenzie Crook stars as Paul, a luckless London Underground wage slave who, after two passengers fall under his train in quick succession, is told that a third kill will mean instant retirement on compassionate grounds plus ten years’ salary.

He thus trawls the city for potential suicides, and soon catches an Irish alcoholic called Tommy (Colm Meaney) about to plunge from the infamous Hornsey Lane Bridge (aka Suicide Bridge). Offering Tommy fifteen hundred pounds and a blow-out weekend, Paul convinces him to use his train instead of the bridge. The pair thus make an appointment for a Monday morning manslaughter.

Of course, much has been made of the ostensible tastelessness of this premise. And true, the first two deaths are played for laughs – Elvis Costello’s ‘Accidents Will Happen’ tinkles on the soundtrack while the body falls beneath the train and we instantly cut to a close-up of ketchup splurging onto a plate.

And yet the movie treats the central subject of Tommy’s proposal with such solemnity (touching on tricky debates about euthanasia and assisted suicide) that it essentially erases the memory of its opening flippancy.

As a mainstream comedy too, the movie has a few teething problems. It wants to get Tommy and Paul together for a weekend in the country, and watch Tommy reconcile with his estranged wife Rosemary (Imelda Staunton), and let Paul release his neurosis by falling for Tommy’s fiery daughter Frankie (up’coming Bond girl Gemma Arterton). But before this it stumbles through some unsuccessful scenes, including a botched burglary, and a broad, increasingly wearisome turn from Antony Scher as a flamboyant German cannibal killer similar to tabloid favourite Armin Meiwes.

When it finds its rhythm, however, the movie relishes the loving bond between Tommy and Paul – which, naturally, makes their morbid pact more excruciating by the minute. The actors play perfectly to type, with Crook’s soulful face a classic foil to Meaney's hair-trigger truculence. They are directed by Jonathan Gershfield, a former promo veteran who worked on the surrealist TV comedy series Big Train. With this, his feature debut, Gershfield proves himself to be stylistically unfussy, and smart enough to let the moments of high-tension drama dominate, especially in the third act. For here, as Paul and Tommy’s plan reaches fruition, and a tube train thunders down a track towards a man that it may or may not demolish, Three and Out becomes a thing of eerie beauty, asking bigger questions about life, and about death, and leaving you in no doubt that it treats the reality of the latter with the utmost respect.

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