The film’s humorous intent remains uncertain. With sudden ugly violence, it lurches uneasily between hardscrabble noir and black comedy of the slapstick ‘hide the corpse’genre, with Eddie Marsan’s venal undertaker and John Turturro playing just a bit too much for laughs. Good black comedy mixes horror with the absurd, creating exceptional work such as Fargo or Man Bites Dog, where you can’t quite believe you laughed at something so monstrous or taboo. I heard laughter in the cinema when I sent to see God’s Pocket, but I sensed an audience unsure if they were supposed, or allowed, to laugh.

However, one of the most unequivocally powerful things about this film is its aesthetic. Everything is faded and dirty from sweat and breath. Everything is badly made and overused. And perhaps the uneasy tension in this film is how it tempts the outsider to stereotyping and prejudice, both within the film and outside it. Shellburn’s public sentimentalisation of the people of this working class district—“… dirty-faced, uneducated, neat as a pin inside…”—turns out, in the end, to be a terrible, fatal error.