Jon Jacobs plays Joshua, a gentle, naive drifter from Liverpool who winds up in L.A., where he gets quietly drunk in a Thai restaurant on the Sunset Strip. There he crosses paths with an attractive blond, Ana (Ayesha Hauer), who expresses concern and takes him home (an old warehouse). The next morning he wakes to find himself chained to the shell of a '38 Olds, which serves as her bed. She's out buying heroin with money stolen from him.

It takes a while for Ana, now high on her fix, to admit to the loneliness that caused her to make Joshua her prisoner; by that time a mutual attraction sets in that grows into love. But have they any future together? It is amazing that Dib, in his feature directorial debut (he wrote the script with Jacobs), and his actors make us care as much as we do. There's a vulnerability and honesty to Joshua and Ana, and they are beautifully played by Jacobs and Hauer. Dib's subtle, graceful direction makes this essentially two-charactor drama feel like a filmed play. Welcome Says The Angel, which will continue indefinitely Fridays and Saturdays at midnight, is a winner about seeming losers.

The simple saga centers on Joshua (Jon Jacobs), a drifter from England who lands in the mean streets of L.A. In a seedy Hollywood bar he's befriended by Ana (Ayesha Hauer), another wandering Euro, and the two go off to her loft.

However, following a night of intimacy, Joshua awakes to find himself cuffed to the hulk of a vintage Oldsmobile (presumably a failed attempt at artistic expression). His wallet's been purloined and the young woman is nowhere to be found. When Ana returns, his money's gone and she's tripping out from a heroin fix. She's not about to free her cash captive.

Though it unravels at a leisurely pace, the tale written by Jacobs and director Philippe Dib maintains an air of mystery and curiosity that's simultaneously unnerving and engrossing. Ana's initial motivation may have been monetary but that end clearly has finite dimensions.

The verbal interplay between the two actors is essentially banal. However, they strike a chord that rings true and embody characters whose plight seems authentic and immediate. It's not so much love that drives them apart and brings them back together, rather a need for companionship. As they develop a bond, Joshua's zeal to get the woman off drugs is less about passion and more as a personal check about his own sobriety.

Filmed in a stark, spare manor, Welcome Says The Angel benefits from its visual simplicity and an eerie musical track composed by Nels Cline and George Lockwood. However, it's truly the chemistry between Jacobs and Hauer that glues the pieces together. While neither is conventionally attractive, they have a raw energy and naivete which is appealing.

Pic is unquestionably a testament to making the most of nothing and Dib is still culpable of much youthful indulgence as stray, artful images and lingering too long on perceived clever dialogue. Somehow it doesn't seriously impugn the picture's integrity or the forceful depiction of slightly desperate, if inviolable, marginalia.

Joshua (Jon Jacobs) is a drifter with a Liverpudlian burr who crash-lands into the mean streets of Hollywood. Stumbling drunk on his first night in town, he is taken home by Ana (Ayesha Hauer), a chain-smoking junkie. Joshua awakens to find himself chained to Ana's bed (a hollowed out, abandoned car), Ana and his cash missing. She returns with a greasy burger for him and a stash of heroin for herself.

As played by Jacobs, Joshua is the perfect victim. Sloe-eyed and affectless, a man cut loose from his past, Joshua isn't particularly alarmed by the hand that fate and Ana have dealt him. As one of Dib's characters suggests, you can't get someone to leave a place where they want to be. But Ana is only a half-hearted jailer. She joins Joshua in his prison (that car that's stopped going anywhere but in circles) and they begin an erotic pas de deux that is the films core. Their sex is desperate and inarticulate, a mutual clawing towards comfort and a shred of happiness.

Welcome's dynamic is a disarmingly simple one. Finally freed, Joshua turns the tables on Ana and imprisons her, forcing her to go cold turkey. Dib plays out her painful withdrawal in what feels like real time -- together with Joshua, we are witnesses to her demonic struggle. Hauer (daughter of Rutger Hauer) turns in a harrowing, gutsy performance, baring her soul and body with fierce abandon. Welcome works because Hauer breaks down and then reconstructs herself in front of our eyes.

Shot for a miniscule $17,000 in a warehaouse space near downtown L.A., Welcome Says The Angel is technically crude at times, with an imperfect soundtrack and some amateurish supporting performances. But Dib makes these minor faults work for him -- the film's matter-of-fact earnestness is captivating. With unnerving grace, Dib mines beauty from his mis-en-scene of ruin. Joshua and Ana's internal odyssey ends with them wrapped in each other's arms, like lovers frozen in a snowdrift. Stark and sincere, Dib's Welcome Says The Angel suggests that when you're passing through hell, the light at the end of the tunnel is love.