Star rating: ***

A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do in Greg Loftin's audacious and largely successful bid to set a western on a London council estate. The Saxon housing scheme, slap bang in the middle of a flightpath, is a place where the community lives in fear of their homes being demolished and of the local hardmen who call themselves, tongue-in-cheek, The Bailiffs. It's a nice touch of black humour in a film that's coated in the stuff.

In fine western tradition, Saxon centres around an enigmatic loner striding into town. When we first meet Fast Eddie (Sean Harris) he's having an eye gouged out for not repaying a debt fast enough. Told the other will follow if he doesn't cough up soon, he returns to his old stomping ground of Saxon looking for Kevin, an old mate who is in the money after winning a television quiz show. Eddie, judging by the way the locals look sideways at him, is a man with a past in these parts.

Kevin turns out to be missing and his desperate wife hires Eddie to track him down. So begins Eddie's descent into some long dark nights of the soul. Before this week is over, he will look back on the time his eye was gouged out and regard it as as not a bad evening, all things considered.

Just as Clint Eastwood was the Man with No Name, Harris tends to be the Actor with No Name. The face is familiar, and when you see it appear in a film or television drama it's a guarantee of a notable performance to come. Yet so completely does he tend to disappear into a character - Joy Division's Ian Curtis in 24 Hour Party People, a psycho security guard in the otherwise dire Outlaw - it's hard to remember him in his own right from one outing to the next. Having long been confined to relatively minor roles, Saxon is his chance to make an impression and he falls on it like a starving man spying a plate of pork chops. With Fast Eddie he takes an apparently simple, fairly unlikeable loser and turns him into someone to care about.

Saxon is Loftin's first feature, and at times it shows. He can't resist demonstrating what's in his box of tricks - slo-mo, fast forwarding the action, setting up whimsical scenes - even when this doesn't add much to proceedings. He struggles to keep the pace going after a sprinting start, but makes up for it with a nicely executed ending. All in, an impressive debut that reflects the years of effort Loftin spent honing his script before going into production.

Tonight and Friday, 9.45pm, Filmhouse.