Down Terrace has been described as “The Sopranos meet Mike Leigh,” which gets some of the vibe, although it has as much to do with, say, British sketch comedy and the workaday pub-crawler gravitas of a Ray Davies lyric. It follows a course of events in the lives of a crime family living in a Brighton council estate in the days following the release of its heir apparent Karl (Robin Hill) from prison. He’s been ratted on, for some sort of crime, and this unforgivable act supplies an ostensible dramatic motor as his father Bill (Robert Hill), mother Maggie (Julia Deakin), and various associates experience a total meltdown. It is a sublimely understated meltdown, by Godfather standards, and rather earnestly philosophical. And, well, not so much to do with illegal activities than with the not uncommon tensions and humiliations that occur among stressed-out families… even those that don’t resort to bumping people off.

Guy Ritchie would never do it like this.

“In England we have a lot of crime movies being made and they all tend to be one-note, and the one note is young lads with guns threatening each other,” Robin Hill says. “This is a reaction against that.” Hill, who co-wrote, edited and stars in the film, plays its deceptively milquetoast, hen- and parent-picked lead: a diffident 30-something ex-con, living at home with the folks as he plans a wedding with his visibly preggers girlfriend Valda (Hill’s real-life wife, Kerry Peacock), whom his family loathes. Dad (played by Hill’s father) is an aging former hipster, who still gets high and plays Robert Johnson tunes on slide guitar. Mum is, well, the quintessential English mother figure (played by, yep, Hill’s mother), puttering around in the garden.

“We wanted to make a crime film,” Hill explained during a chat over a beer at The Highball Lounge during last fall’s Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas, where Down Terrace had its American premeire. “But whereas most crime films are all about the crime—you have a heist movie, and all the details of how the heist is going to get done—that’s so conventional. What we really want to do is make a crime movie, but you never really even know what the crime is. You take all of that stuff out of it. There are even more puritan versions of the script where ALL the crime happens offscreen. All you get effectively are the bits between the bits and you only ever see them when they’re not doing crimes. That’s still reflected in the movie. What exactly does that family do? Who knows? Who cares? Because as soon as people start talking about their crimes and their plans, for me it becomes sort of dull.”

Directed by Hill’s friend Ben Wheatley (a viral media whiz who blogs at MrAndMrsWheatley.com), the film was conceived as a modest, if intensive, exercise to get away from the FX- and animation-driven shorts on which they’d been frequent collaborators. The whole thing was shot in eight days in the house where Hill’s parents actually live on the actual Down Terrace. “We took all the scenes and divided them by the number of days we had and came up with a half-hour to shoot each scene,” Hill says. “It was done with a stop-watch.”

Much of the soundtrack, which features songs by British folk legends Karen Dalton and Annie Briggs, was added after the shoot, although how much remains in the theatrical version of the film—due this summer from Magnolia—remains unclear. The air of autumnal melancholy it evokes gives the film’s final act some unexpected shadings. “You think it’s a comedy,” says producer Andy Starke, “and then the rug comes out.”