Don’t kid yourself. We all need to give and get love. And we all need to be sentimental. Don’t mock the soft-toy tendency. It could happen to you, and make you a nicer person.

That is roughly the thesis of this dead-pan, wickedly well-performed and really quite disturbing movie. It’s some sort of comedy, but only in a very sick-puppy sort of way.

Laura Shannon plays Peggy, an office worker, straight as an arrow. She doesn’t beg for our sympathy and certainly lets everyone else have the laughs. (In particular, Laura Dern, playing her sister-in-law, gets a proper satirical turn as a modern suburbanite mum.) Peggy is looking for love, preferably from a man but from a mutt (or any number of mutts) if that fails. Stuck with the hopelessness of the modern male (always an easy trope), she gets more and more into animal-worship.

But here’s the twist. One is made aware that her devotion to animals is entirely logical. I mean that even if she had found a man, as most women do, her being bound up with him would only have been a distraction from a human responsibility for animal suffering. In short, we are made to see that though she is an extremist, she is definitely on to something.

This is the antithesis of a feel-good movie. It is bleak. But it is also realistic. Just as we think Peggy has disappeared into nuttiness, she is rescued by nearly everyone around her. Her reward to them is that she becomes quite sane again. And more quiet and resolute in the cause of animals.

I can’t at this moment think of the proper movie parallels here. The marvellous Best In Show is an obvious one. But I am sure there are more.

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We meet people low down in the Mafia scheme of things. A bag man who schlepps about paying out Mafia pensioners. A pair of punks thinking to take on the existing local leaders. A young boy getting his face known. A canny middle aged apparatchic fixing up the quarries the Mafia’s waste disposal business needs. A gown manufacturer caught out as he negotiates Mafia loans for his business. The manufacturer’s cutter caught out as he sells his expertise to the local Chinese.

The bagman is a weary coward. The punks are manically incompetent. The young boy is exploring his inner gay. The waste man is deeply wired to his small-scale, indebted landowners. The gown man is just another factory man trying to keep afloat. The cutter really loves those gowns.

There’s no apology or glorification here. We see ambition, fear, courage and weakness all flopping about together. These slices of life – of business life as much as of gangsterism – seem utterly convincing.

And the filming is so matter of fact that its extraordinary beauty might be missed. To be this realistic and this artistic – that’s genius, I’d say.

It is also a campaigning film. It makes one hate the Mafia. It ought also to make people glad to live in Britain or anywhere relatively prosaic. We may be a bit shaky just at this moment, but institutional captalism and law and order suddenly look really lovely.

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Here’s one I prepared earlier – it covers movies released 1995-2005.

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