"God will forgive them. He'll forgive them, and allow them into heaven. I can't live with that."

That's the opening narration of Dead Man's Shoes, and I have no idea why this movie is so amazing, but it is. Paddy Considine, who wrote the screenplay, stars as this soldier named Richard whose retarded brother Anthony is tormented by thugs in their hometown. It's not clear what he's been doing in the army, but it's clear Richard has become an extremely dangerous man since leaving town... describing him, one of these thugs says "The man who left isn't the one who came back," and alludes to his having been a commando. He's right, because Richard has come back to town only to hunt down his brother's tormentors one by one. It's like Get Carter with Grizzly Adams, and it's brilliant.

What's so gripping is the realness of this film, especially Paddy Considine as Richard, who seems like such a genuine, real person but gets this murderous look flashing over his eyes, sliding mercurially from warmth to rage in an instant. He's a sympathetic hero, very likable, and it's hard not to root for him, but he's also a genuinely frightening character. This film manages to be both so stark and horrifying in its depiction of what amounts to a series of violent crimes, but also strangely funny. This is what the realistic feel of the grainy film, shaky cam without autofocus style of film-making was intended for, filming Paddy Considine right up close where every drop of rain on his coat and his hair is in perfect, sharp focus. The victimization of his brother is all shot in black and white, super-8 film like some awful home movie, the vivid image everyone touched by it has keeps replaying in their head.

When Richard first makes contact with one of his targets, while it's still unclear what he has in mind, he appears at the doorway to an apartment building in a gas mask, pounding on the glass and gesturing for his target to come out. I don't know what's so scary about that, but there is something terrifying in this inhuman face Richard chooses to put on. His drugged out mark goes running back up the stairs screaming about an elephant with great, staring eyes outside the door, not really sure what he saw in the shocked moment before he ran. When asked about his first round of psychological warfare, he makes it clear in about two sentences that this will not end until people are dead.

There's some brilliant lines in the drug-addled tough guy rambling of the local gangsters Richard is stalking, and in the absolutely chilling things he says to them. When one of them waking from a drugged stupor gets off the couch he passed out on, and sees a blurry Richard standing in the room with him, he asks, "Are you the Devil?" Richard's response, with a shy grin and no bravado, is "You wish I fucking was, mate."

There is more to this than a grimly executed revenge story, because there's more to it than Richard initially tells us. He's a fascinating character, in a film that's so perfectly executed it really mysteriously rises way above the genre flick I thought it would be. I still don't really have a grasp on how this is so good, but my first thought when the credits rolled was just wow.

I never would have heard of it either, had it not been nominated for Best British Film at the '05 British Academy Awards. Paddy Considine seems to be showing up in more and more quality stuff, like the excon who's found Jesus in My Summer of Love, devoted to being a man of peace, building a cross to overlook the valley and starting his own church, but still capable of snapping and choking the life out of a teenage girl without warning. Seriously, if you were at a dinner with this guy, based on the characters he plays I'd love to sit next to him but also give him plastic utensils: fascinating but scary as hell.

"I told him not to mention the elephant."