So it was one heck of a dark, wet and dreary night on the streets of Hackney, but the Picturehouse beckoned like a warm and welcoming lighthouse somewhere in the foggy distance. After finally settling down and thawing my chilly frame over a rejuvenating hot chocolate, I began to contemplate the imminent screening of the much-anticipated Prevenge, as well as the Q&A session with its writer/director/lead-actor, Alice Lowe, due to follow immediately after.

I reminisced about her work up to now. Since graduating from Cambridge, Lowe has steadily established herself as one of the more interesting talents in the film and television industry. There’s the superb Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, in which, like the rest of the cast, she plays an actress (Madelaine Wool) playing a character (Dr Liz Asher) with surreal and hilarious consequences. Then, more recently, there’s her co-lead performance in the Ben Wheatley-directed Sightseers, which, as far as I’m concerned, is one of the best British films of the decade so far. But it’s Lowe’s co-writing credit on Sightseers that many tend to miss (including myself), and one which will very soon come to the light now that she has absolutely smashed it in all respects when it comes to Prevenge.

“This is a meticulously written, intelligently performed and organically captured piece of cinema”

Like all great comics, Lowe is fiercely intelligent, and as I settled into my seat, I couldn’t help but feel that what I was about to watch was this fierce intelligence of Lowe’s let loose in all its glory. And, for once, I was actually right (yes, it’s true! Alert the press!). Prevenge is as dark as it is funny, as wicked as it is heartfelt, and as bold as it is classic. Set in the seaside town where the father of her unborn child was killed, Lowe’s character, Ruth, in delightfully aptronymic fashion, ruthlessly dispatches the ones she believes are to blame for his death – with the unborn baby still inside her, acting as the guide on her path of revenge.

And if you’re wondering whether the baby bump is prosthetic, you’re dead wrong. Lowe undertook the writing, directing and performing of Prevenge all whilst pregnant with her first child. One might reasonably conclude that this could account for how well Lowe wears so comfortably the lead role throughout, dominating the screen and demolishing every obstacle in her path.

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Indeed, as Ruth dryly undermines her midwife’s clichéd sentiments of encouragement in the scheduled hospital consultations between murders, or as she waddles away awkwardly from a corpse gushing blood from its genitals whilst she holds her belly and almost buckles under its weight, one could quite easily put this down to a certain level of experience of expecting (hopefully experience of the former situation and not the latter). But I just don’t want to take away from Lowe the simple fact that, pregnancy or not, this is a meticulously written, intelligently performed and organically captured piece of cinema.

To paraphrase one very wonderfully dark and witty moment in the film (you’ll all know it when you see it), Lowe 'knows her onions'. Go and see Prevenge, and revel in just how good we have it with British filmmakers like Alice Lowe right now