Given that mid 90s Britain is a stale, grey island off the coast of Europe, it seems remarkable that anyone should even wonder at our indigenous film industry being anything more than a stale, grey TV offcut. The roots of Butterfly Kiss are well grounded in the box - from a former Coronation Street writer; a director off superior police procedural Cracker - but the results are significantly more than Monday night ITV.

For starters, the picture brings in two of the more provocative of contemporary actresses from either side of the Atlantic. Amanda Plummer - daughter of Christopher and best known for her Tarantino cameo - is Eunice, thrift shop dressed, all-purpose homicidal nutter about the North. She is on a quest to find a woman called Judith, and the song (not a love song, more "a song about love") flitting through her ratty-haired head.

Eunice picks up the crumpled, sensible-shoed Miriam (Saskia Reeves), seduces her in the council flat the mouse-like, slightly dim garage attendant shares with her ageing mother, and wonders at her protege following like a dog on a string as Eunice murders her way across country.

It's not for a while that the unusualness of Winterbottom's film really makes itself evident. Service stations are not fuelled on tabloid headlines about the killings, public buildings are filled with muzak rather than sensationalist new reports. We see no police investigation. There is no Natural Born Killers media celebrity. The deaths are a necessary propellant, but not what the film is about. In that, it's automatically elevated above grim flock wallpaper tea bag Brit serial killers like Dirty Weekend or the execrable White Angel. Butterfly Kiss is gritty rather than nasty.

Plummer makes for an uneasy star. The characteristic nervous energy of Static or The Fisher King is channelled into making Eunice explosively unpredictable enough to keep things edgy, even if her accent is perplexing. Reeves is less flamboyant and better. With The Puzzler ubiquitously poking from the pocket of her anorak, her celebration of Pot Noodle mundanity, she anchors the picture. She does good work too with a black and white video telling the story in flashback - think Myra Hindley by way of Victoria Wood - but often it seems redundant. By the inevitable, exquisitely shot climax the film seems to have realised it too.

The nature of the country means, of course, that a UK road movie is essentially impossible, and Frank Cottrell Boyce's script knows it. Where the lovers of Wild At Heart or Badlands might have picaresque deserts, weird small towns to disappear into, Butterfly Kiss revels in its forlorn motorways, an endless round of Happy Eaters and Camelot theme parks. A rain-lashed vista where the knights of these particular roads collect petrol tokens. It says all and nothing that Eunice's mythical love song is New Order's World Cup anthem, 'World In Motion'.

It's not all plain sailing - Plummer is perhaps a little too fond of showing off her piercings and tattoos (one wonders what, say, Jane Horrocks might have done with the role), and however well chosen, the songs - Bjork, Cranberries, PJ Harvey - do tend to swamp John Harle's commendable, subtle score. Young women killers are a strangely hot sub-genre of the moment - Fun, New Zealand's Heavenly Creatures - and while Butterfly Kiss is not in the same league as Peter Jackson's brilliant Kiwi shocker, as an example of nervy, genuinely cinematic British film-making it more than deserves a sympathetic audience.