Ray Winstone plays Colin Diamond, a seemingly hard-nosed crook who is confronted by the heartbreak of his wife leaving him for a young French waiter. His loyal band of mates, operating under a morally ambiguous code of honour, kidnap his wife’s lover and lock him up in a cupboard.

“Here is this group of characters, and I think we know and love and understand these archetypal characters,“ Venville says.

The film is driven by a cross-section of weird and wonderful characters. The humour lies in the rough yet intelligent nature of the characters, and to some extent in the pathetic descent of Diamond as heartbreak takes hold.

The film is shot almost entirely in one room, as the gang stand around the cupboard deciding what to do with ‘Loverboy’. It was shot with a strong regard for production values and cinematic narrative.

“What I’m not interested in is that independent movie style docudrama,” Venville says. “I wanted to make something overtly cinematic. I wanted to really celebrate images and characters within spaces.”

The film is peppered with passionate obscenities, a familiar dialect to most audiences that is steeped in the history of the English crime culture.

“It’s so much part of the vernacular when you talk about East London,” Venville explains. “Dickens, or even Chaucer, is very much woven into the English language. So it’s authentic to let the language be perverse or obscene.”

One of the major shaping influences in Venville’s storytelling was his upbringing as the son of two profoundly deaf parents.

“I think what’s interesting about profoundly deaf people is that they only perceive the world through their eyes. So they look at you, they can’t hear the sound of your voice, so they are looking at your body and your face to recognise your feelings. I think with photography and film, body language is equal to dialogue. So it helped me understand or to inscribe into the actors’ performance that to give a fuller and richer performance their bodies are as important as their words.”

‘44 Inch Chest’ is out Thursday April 29 exclusive to Dendy Cinema Portside.