An interesting phenomenon in recent years has been the number of British film-makers who have taken their productions aboard, whether for reasons of frustration or simply to get better value for money from another country's specialisms.

So far, this has given us Gareth Edwards' Monsters, a romantic creature feature filmed in Central America, and Gareth Evans' The Raid, an accomplished martial arts thriller that took full advantage of the genre industry in Jakarta.

Now we have Sean Ellis with Metro Manila, a thoughtful drama/heist movie set in the Philippines that not only captures a beautiful fly-on-the-wall view of the capital's desperate underside, but also delivers some superb twists and turns as the central crime story starts to reveal itself.

Jake Macapagal stars as Oscar Ramirez, a low-paid farmer from the provinces who is forced to look elsewhere for work when the price of rice drops to an all-time low. Taking his wife and two young children to Manila, Oscar is easy meat for scammers and crooks, who take advantage of his guileless naivety. After the family finally wind up in a filthy shack in a slum district, Oscar's wife finds work in a hostess bar, leaving her children to the care of a catatonic old crone while she waits for customers in the "aquarium".

A glimmer of hope appears when Oscar gets a job as a security guard, a role to which he is fast-tracked because of a tattoo that shows him to be a former serviceman. His partner is Ong (John Arcilla), an experienced guard who offers kind and fatherly advice, even supplying Oscar with a filthy joke to impress the boss of bosses, known as The Laughing Buddha. Life is finally on the right track, but after picking up a box of cash from a small-time coke dealer, Ong begins to drop hints about stealing the shipment, causing pangs of conflict in the scrupulously honest but dirt-poor Oscar.

The first hour, which builds up the obstacles facing the family, could be any migrant drama of the past few years. But as Oscar becomes immersed in the life of a security guard, Ellis slowly introduces sly elements of the crime thriller that will bring the proceedings to a completely unexpected climax.

The film erupts into sporadic violence that at first appears simply to underscore the dangers inherent in Oscar's new job. By the end, however, Ellis reveals himself to be one step ahead, tying everything up in one very neatly scripted package.

Metro Manila isn't as brutal as The Raid or as fanciful as Monsters, but it is poetic, honest and at times almost upsettingly real. It will be fascinating to see what Ellis does next.