When people talk about “the British gangster film” these days, what they talk about is the post-gangster film. Not the Guy Ritchie crap, but gleefully malicious, verbally acrobatic, horrifically violent and oddly comic films like In Bruges and Sexy Beast – in which Cockney thugs disperse themselves upon the European Continent in a bid to get away from all that, only to come face to face with what they fear the most.

Newly released by Criterion, The Hit (1984) is an underappreciated gem that supplied the template for this mini-genre. Directed by Stephen Frears (amid the early ‘80s boomlet in independent British arthouse fare), the film now abides outside that context, untethered to the period trappings of Frears’s more ballyhooed efforts of the day, the socio-politically all-too-topically race-and-gender infused Hanif Kureshi screenplays My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. Whatever their merits, those are time-capsule pieces. The Hit is a minor, existential classic. It’s an almost-perfect small movie that largely plays out its subdued and simmering drama between four actors in a stolen Mercedes-Benz, variously winding up and psyching out each other as they roll through the Spanish badlands towards the French border and a (mostly and inevitably) fatal date with their destinies.

Willie Parker (Terence Stamp) is a “supergrass,” a mobster turned informer who has ratted out his mates in exchange for a get out of jail free card and immediate evacuation to the south of Spain, where he has lived for 10 years in easeful anonymity. One day, a gang of young local hooligans assault him in his house and kidnap him, handing the parcel off to a craggy English hitman (John Hurt’s stoic Braddock) and his hotheaded apprentice, Myron (Tim Roth). The boys eagerly snatch up a suitcase with their payment, which turns out to be a bomb. But one of the kids survives, and provides enough evidence to put the police (in the form of the great Spanish actor and Bunuel mainstay, Fernando Rey) on the chase.

Almost immediately, a routine plan goes haywire. Stamp, who had dropped out of acting after meteoric fame in the 1960s to pursue the path of Eastern spiritual transcendance (or whatever), seems to channel his own real-life personality, imbuing Willie with a Zen acceptance of his fate. He doesn’t struggle or moan. Instead, he steadily unnerves his captors, playing subtle mind games and clouding their intentions with his air of sublimated detachment. There’s a detour to a safe house in Madrid, where the trio discovers another expatriated mobster, Harry (Bill Hunter), and his 16-year-old concubine Maggie (Laura del Sol). Everyone’s surprised, and everything ends badly – after some excruciatingly tense negotiations – with the kicking, screaming girl hauled along at Braddock’s whim.

There’s not much plot after this: More random bloodshed, more fuck-ups. A lot of talk and a lot of exquisitely charged silence, unfolding against endless landscapes and the Spanish classical guitar of Paco de Lucia. All the performances are killer, each actor engaged in a psychic tug-of-war with the other three: Del Sol’s tempest-in-a-D-cup, Roth’s lethally reckless yet highly suggestible gangster-on-training wheels, Hurt’s crinkled and curdled executioner, increasingly powerless to engineer his assignment as instructed, and Stamp’s deceptively tranquil refugee, almost monk-like in his white slacks and shirt, and still quite the middle-aged hunk, offering koan-like reveries when he might otherwise make a run for it.

“We’re here,” he says, when Braddock, fearful his prey has vanished, catches up to him gazing at a waterfall. “Then we’re not here. We’re somewhere else. Maybe. And it’s as natural as breathing. Why should we be scared?”