Catch Me Daddy is a thriller plucked straight out of the news pages, but at the same time with a sort of mythic quality that belongs very much to cinema.

It could be located anywhere in the world, yet at the same time breathes new life into that old maxim that "it's grim up North".

The subject of this impressive debut by Daniel Wolfe, who co-wrote the script with his brother Matthew, is honour killing. The idea came when the brothers read an article about the execution of a Pakistani girl's boyfriend in a country lane, a disturbing extension of the "punishment" sometimes meted out to Asian women by their disapproving families. While keeping such reality to the fore, the pair have fashioned an edge-of-your-seat chase movie, as two young lovers are pursued across the Yorkshire Moors.

Laila (Sameena Jabeen Ahmed) is a British Pakistani girl in her late teens, living hand-to-mouth with her white boyfriend Aaron (Conor McCarron). During the day she works in a hairdresser's, while he mopes around, supposedly looking for work; at night they get stoned together in their caravan. She's a bright spark, with pink-streaked hair, dazzling green eyes and multi-coloured tights, decking their home in butterfly-shaped lights, her innocent joie de vivre belying their life on the run.

Her father Tariq (Wasim Zakir) wants her back. And he has hired bounty hunters to track the pair down. Two teams, one Asian, one white, form an uneasy alliance as they drive into the moors.

Wolfe builds his scenario slowly, even poetically, introducing the characters in their day-to-day lives - a drug-addicted man alone in a caravan, another in a shopping mall with his toddler in his arms, the lovers walking the moors. But once he joins the dots and puts the drama in motion, it is unrelentingly tense and increasingly disturbing.

The tradition of violent stories in the North stretches from Wuthering Heights to David Peace's Red Riding quartet (also loosely inspired by real events) and its TV adaptation. Unusually in these stories, so-called heroes are as tarnished as the villains. And today it takes very little licence to depict post-industrial towns as being full of emptiness, anger and misery.

Catch Me Daddy takes place in such a milieu, as the pursuers drive from town to desolate town, streets empty, and along the country lands and motorways in between, searching for their quarry. The mood dictated by these men is rank with racial hatred and distrust, greed, twisted pride. Everyone in the film seems to be on drugs.

At the same time, the Wolfes give glimmers of beauty, in nature and the everyday of Laila's enthusiasms. They're aided brilliantly by their cinematographer Robbie Ryan, whose lens makes ravishing images of mist floating over the moors, spilt nail varnish on a table, the remnants of a Black Forest gateau and the dreamy array of Laila's butterfly lights.

And there is humanity too, courtesy of a remarkable performance by Sameena Jabeen Ahmed (like many here, a non-professional actor in her first film), as she depicts Laila's sweetness slowly overcome by terror and despair, and in the skilled turn by Glasgow's ever-reliable Gary Lewis as one of the bounty hunters troubled by memories of his own lost daughter.

Sadly, though, violence prevails. The film's devastating conclusion casts one back to the start of the film, as one of the Pakistani characters tenderly has his photo taken with his child - the film positing a cycle of perverted love and abuse that doesn't bare thinking about.