Gwyneth Hughes’s angry drama is a hard sell – it’s a searing, harrowing 90 minutes based on the true story of a young woman abducted on a British street and sold into sex slavery.
It’s an important story so there’s no point in being fluffy about this; what happens to Ana (a remarkable performance from Anca Dumitra) is brutal. She’s kidnapped, beaten and raped repeatedly as her captors, a Romanian organised crime gang, do their best to break her spirit. In a small, heartbreaking but incredibly significant detail, they even take away her spectacles so she can barely see.
They try to make Ana into nothing: she doesn’t have a passport or even her own name any more, she’s humiliated into parading under different aliases on seedy websites selling sex. And the police, headed by DI Dougie Grant (Allen Leech) can do little in the face of the woman’s abject fear.
Watch on BBC2 Monday 5th November at 9pm.