Films rarely come as a powerful and uncompromising as ‘Retrieval’. From the opening moments to closing sequences it is a searingly direct work which is utterly haunting and impossible to forget.

Set in a gritty industrial city in a backwater of Poland, it depicts the lives of those trying desperately to escape grinding unemployment by any means possible.

Wojtek is young man for whom a newly-acquired job mucking out pigs is a step upwards after we see him, in the first sequences, hanging inside a chimney, hacking away at the choking filth moments before a colleague falls to his death.

He snatches moments of happiness with an older Ukranian woman Katja who, along with her son, has fled her homeland to escape her vicious husband.

Residing illegally, she lives in a dismal flat and works in the twilight economy cleaning a brothel while Wojtek plans a better life.

But his problems really begin when he falls in with a smooth nightclub owner who hires Wojtek, an amateur boxer, as a bouncer.

But the beatings don’t end in the ring. Soon he is working as enforcer for his bosses’ extortion racket, terrorising innocent families not too dissimilar from his own. Vicious attacks, evictions and psychological terrorism are all deployed as he his egged on by his frighteningly cold employer.

While Wojtek’s wages soar and he finds a new home for Katja, she is not fooled by his suspiciously acquired status and begins to ask questions.

Meanwhile Wojtek is a man torn by his desire to better his surroundings and his nagging conscience.

Unrelentingly violent ‘Retrieval’ is not for the squeamish. It makes for distinctly uncomfortable viewing. Indeed it seemed to be too much for my DVD player which rejected it several times before finally allowing me to see it through to a powerful conclusion.

But it was worth it because it is an utterly convincing portrayal as life as lived by those cut loose by the collapse of communism but yet to benefit from the market economy.

It shows forgotten areas where scrambling in hills for tiny lumps of coal which are loaded into horse-drawn carts is the best chance of making enough to survive. And it depicts some of the seething ethnic tensions very much alive in central Europe.

The acting is superb, the narrative believable and the tension riveting. Its creator Slawomir Fabicki deserves full praise for having the guts to tell it like it is.