Dirty Pretty Things, written by Steven Knight - Eight out of 10

Dirty Pretty Things, written by Steven Knight

Eight out of 10

A compelling, sad, at times horrifying drama.

Chiwetel Ejiofor is excellent in the leading role of Okwe- the latter a name so appealing to the under signed that he named his Afghan hound…Okwe.

Okwe has escaped Nigeria, for the time being, a country plagued for decades by military dictatorship, lately with an absentee president, a land facing corruption, and military leaders pretend they spend on gear and men to fight the vicious Boko Haram, but they are actually embezzling, like most officials over there, billions of dollars.

The hero has a terrible life in London, where he is an illegal immigrant that has no means to call the police when something awful happens, has to take jobs all round the clock, in a shady hotel, as a cab driver – in the opening scenes he offers cheap rides from the airport, in the days before Uber would have landed.

People from Africa come to him, because they know he has been trained as a doctor and furthermore, he is a kind, generous, dedicated, self- sacrificing man with an extremely sad, exhausted man who takes some leaves – are they the Khat from the Horn of Africa, also known as qat? - to compensate for his almost total lack of sleep.

One of his colleagues, who also work as an illegal driver, comes to the specialist with intimate problems caused by his reckless philandering, for he has had sex without the proper, needed protection and now he has gonorrhea.

Okwe has of course no license to practice in Britain, but he has a good friend, Guo Yi, who helps him with medicine and even risks prosecution a few times to support the man he esteems and likes so much.

Another protagonist of this thriller is Senay Gelik aka the formidable Audrey Tatou - famous for Le Fabuleux Destin D’Amelie Poulain - also an illegal immigrant, who comes from Turkey, works at the same hotel as a maid and has to suffer many indemnities, abuses, even an attempt to have a kidney removed in exchange for falsified identification documents.

The villain of the motion picture is Juan, nicknamed Sneaky, portrayed by another outstanding actor (Pan’s Labyrinth, With a Friend Like Henry), who works in the same hotel as Okwe and Senay, but who is in control of a very lucrative, if gruesome, loathsome operation.

One day, the hero finds a…human heart in the blocked toilet of one of hotel rooms and when informed, Sneaky pretends to be willing to have the employee call the police and talk to them, knowing the illegal immigrant has no intention to contact them; he is trying to avoid immigration authorities.

Indeed, as he is in the room of the woman he loves, Senay, these very officials come to search the premises, look in the bathroom, interrogate the woman, make clear she is not permitted to work for the duration of the evaluation of her applications, find the name of the hotel on a match box and then try to catch her doing something illegal.

Okwe is very intrigued, appalled by the organ he has found in the hotel, knowing full well that the explanations are not valid- the doorman, Ivan, proposes various scenarios, but this heart had belonged to a healthy individual and it is an occurrence that we do not expect generally, isn’t it?

Furthermore, he finds two African men in the vicinity, one of them very ill, after a rudimentary, operation had been performed, a kidney had been extracted, the wound is infected, and the Nigerian doctor helps to save the poor man that would otherwise die.

One night, the officers from Immigration arrive at the hotel, as Okwe is at the reception, on duty, Senay is about to arrive and get trapped as she takes on her illegal job as maid, while the door man is in an adjacent room, with Juliette, a kind whore that would become the friend of the Turkish immigrant…

“The whore and the virgin, what an unusual combination” as Juliette puts it.

The hero discovers that Sneaky Juan is the mastermind of the scheme of dangerous, illegal, abhorrent surgeries that offer destitute, illegal immigrants false documents in exchange for vital organs, in a deal wherein everybody wins, the gangster pretends, when he is the only one who actually benefits, becoming rich by taking advantage of the desperation of traumatized people.

Senay has to abandon the position at the hotel, works for another ruthless, vicious, predatory, monster of a man, who wants to rape her when the authorities trace her steps and come to his illegal manufacturing business.

Sneaky Juan is pressing the cornered Senay, who has lost the job with the abusive boss, when she has rejected his sexual harassment and abuse, to give one kidney ion exchange for the falsified documents that would allow her to go to America or anyway change the life that is so hard on the woman now.

When it seems there is no way out - if called, the police would deport them, in Nigeria, the doctor had had troubles with the corrupt authorities – Okwe waits for the villain in the parking lot and for a while it seems there would be a violent confrontation between the nefarious crime lord, who had taken a weapon from his car to hit the hero, and the hopeless protagonist.

However, Okwe proposes that he would operate, to make sure that Senay would not die because of an infection, boils all the instruments, brings Vicious Juan in to help, give him the things he would need, we see the young woman on the operating table, apparently asleep from some anesthetic and then there is a big, pleasant, if still gruesome surprise…

Dirty Little Things is an excellent motion picture, nominated for an Academy Award for Best Writing.