2003, R, 107 minutes

Dirty Pretty Things takes place amid the dark, sometimes ugly, and mostly depressing world of London’s illegal immigrant population. These illegal immigrants, as portrayed in Stephen Frears new film, are the ones that clean up your messes, keep your secrets, and move you from place to place. But unlike you, they have no one to look after them; they are at the mercy of their own wits, and in some cases, the kindness of others.

This may sound like an artsy, snooze inducing premise, but wait a minute folks, it’s also the story about a perfectly healthy human heart found in a hotel room toilet.

Hopefully that got your attention. Indeed, it is the human heart in the potty that gets Dirty Pretty Things kicking into high gear. On the surface this film is a suspense movie, a who-done-it-and-why picture. Okwe (pronounced Oh-Quay) is the front desk operator at a posh London Hotel, and he is the one who finds the heart in the toilet. He is also an illegal immigrant from Nigeria; a doctor who has a past that he would rather not talk about. When he’s not working at the hotel he’s either driving a cab for a taxi service run by a sleazy owner who prods him for drugs to cure his sexually transmitted diseases, or he’s doing his best to look out for a naïve Turkish girl that is a maid at the hotel, who while not an illegal immigrant, has no rights to be working in England.

Things go from bad to worse for Okwe and the Turkish Girl when immigration officers come knocking on her door. She is forced into finding work in a sweat shop that before long begins stealing both her will to get out of England and move to America, and her innocence. At the same time, Okwe finds himself falling deeper and deeper into the mystery that he is trying to unravel.

Being that there is a major suspense element to Dirty Pretty Things, giving away much more about the plot would lessen the impact on the viewer, but much can be said about other areas of the film. The acting is some of the best that you are going to see this year, especially that of Chiwetel Ejiofor as Okwe. He brings to life such a pained character that his impact on the audience is almost immediate. He doesn’t even have to say a word to convey exactly what is going through Okwe’s mind, his eyes do a better acting job in this film than most actors could do with a hundred monologues in a hundred films. He plays it tough when he has to, and is especially good in the quiet moments of the film. Audrey Tautou, who plays the Turkish woman that Okwe takes on as his responsibility, is also a stand out. Anyone unsure that Tautou would be able to break out of the mold that she helped create as the wonderfully cheery Amelie in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s modern fairytale from 2001 need not worry at all; Tautou plays her part very seriously here, she is naïve, but not unaware of how dangerous the world is around her, and she’s not afraid to push back when she feels threatened.

Stephen Frears, who has directed many fine features in his time (Dangerous Liaisons, High Fidelity) once again shows that he is among the best at weaving many different stories into a complete film without weighing it down and making a confusing mess. In fact, while there are tough moments in Dirty Pretty Things (some being thematic and others being downright icky to look at) Frears finds ways to inject humor that is both laugh out loud funny at times and also very sweet and gentle. And it is done without muddling the storyline.

Some may say that Dirty Pretty Things leans a little too far toward beating the audience over the head with its tale of the woes of illegal immigrants working as almost invisible people in a modern society, but the point is moot anyway because this film is dealing with so many smaller, personal issues that it doesn’t take much for the audience to see that these characters are not bound by the situations they find themselves in. They can choose to stay invisible, or find a way to break away from it. In the end, it’s not so much about the degradation of a group of people, but the ways they choose to deal with that degradation. Well, that and the heart in the toilet.