Cousins Chatila (Mahmoud Bakri) and Reda (Aram Sabbah) don’t have the luxury of morality. Undocumented Palestinian refugees living hand to mouth in Athens, they subsist on what they can scrape from petty crimes. Chatila has a plan – to save enough to reach Germany, where they will open a cafe. Reda, meanwhile, has a drug habit. Clean for a month, his addiction continues to get in the way of his view of the future. Clinging to his smarter, stronger cousin, Reda asks again to hear about the cafe, like a kid pleading for a bedtime story. When a scheme to make money backfires, Chatila snatches opportunity from the jaws of disappointment and comes up with a plan to earn enough to escape Athens. But it’s a plan that comes with a considerable cost, both to the desperate victims Chatila plans to target and to the cousins, who have to live with themselves afterwards.

Mahdi Fleifel’s taut thriller, which plays out predominantly in Arabic and English, has something of the ragged outlaw urgency of Midnight Cowboy. The hard-scrabble gutter existence is vividly captured by a restless, questioning camera, but we learn the most from Bakri’s superb performance, as he wrestles with guilt over what he has become.

• In UK and Irish cinemas