Finding what dirt lies hidden under the rug of luxury

With Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, the writer Steven Knight conjured up a TV show with a rugged punch of a title. It encouraged the worst in contestants, daring them to keep their wits about them while competing in a Dutch-oven environment for the possibility of walking home with up to seven figures in newly disposable income.

By contrast, Knight's script for Dirty Pretty Things, a swift, tangy drama with an equally terse title, pits London's illegal immigrants against the alluring hope of propriety. There's no lifeline that's a phone call away, either. The immigrants are expendable manpower in the war to man the mops, kitchens and bottom-drawer duties of the world of luxury hotels, where they are unnoticed by the public and underpaid and overworked by their employers.

This understated and sure film is set in a world of survivors, a forgotten group of people struggling to bring in enough income so that they don't become disposable. One of them -- the Nigerian Okwe (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who drives a cab and also works as a hotel porter under the large thumb of a smooth-operating night manager named Sneaky (Sergi Lopez) -- seems to be as haunted as he is obsessed.

Portraying Okwe's plight could help to absolve Knight of the flame-out success of Millionaire, which placed a planet-sized karmic debt on the writer's shoulders for sparking the reality show glut. This movie is just the opportunity for Knight to square that account. It is an urban horror story rendered with grim intelligence by the man with the right tools for the job: the British director Stephen Frears.

Okwe, red-eyed and cruising on minimal energy because he works double shifts, is a doctor on the run from his homeland. The movie doesn't elaborate on the troubles that have sent him so far from home; all we really know is that he has left a wife and a daughter behind, and part of his pain comes from pining for them.

That lingering misery is what keeps him safely on the couch of his Turkish roommate, the virginal Senay (Audrey Tautou), refusing to act on the magnetism that keeps her gazing at him adoringly. He's capable of loyalty to the rest of his ad hoc family: Guo Yi (Benedict Wong), a mortuary attendant, and Juliette (Sophie Okonedo), the dangerously close-to-cliche, lovable hooker. The actress's clever portrayal brings shading and warmth to an otherwise stereotyped part.

Dirty Pretty Things suggests a demented sequel to Paul Mazursky's Moscow on the Hudson, a dog-eared fairy tale in which industry and hard work could deliver refugees from evil, or at least into the middle classes. In Dirty Pretty Things, diligence is not its own reward. The decent have to fight the treacherous undertow of their employers, as well as opportunistic and predatory immigration agents.

The tactful, adroit Frears, whose credits include The Grifters, High Fidelity and Dangerous Liaisons, doesn't overemphasize the acrid, fetid atmosphere of hard-working immigrants clambering from one job to the next to stay alive. The spartan, bleary-eyed plainness of the urban landscape of immigrant London makes the film all the more arresting. Frears's low-key curiosity toward what drives outsiders is a crucial element that lubricates the tough, noir melodramatics of the narrative engine. (It's good to see Frears reunited with the immensely gifted cinematographer Chris Menges, who adds a funereal grace to the film.)