Mandragora - or Mandrake - is a noxious plant named from two Greek words meaning "harmful to cattle". Reportedly hallucinogenic and used in the distant past as an anaesthetic before operations, it was fabled to grow under the gallows of hung men, and thirst for their sperm. When dug up, the plant howled and shrieked and bought instant death to the digger.

After the so-called Velvet Revolution, a romantic event which brought an end to Communist government in Czechosolvakia in 1989 but which ushered in, inevitably, a period of instability and transition, many young Czechs moved from dead rural areas to try their luck in Prague, where organised crime and its industries of drugs and prostitution thrived. For every Lukas Ridgeston, however, there seems to be hundreds of less-photogenic men who end up as exploited, displaced street hustlers grabbing a buck or two on the seedy side of Prague.

Put this recent history and ancient Devil-plant mythology together and you've got Mandragora, a melodramatic and at times simplistic tragedy that succeeds in spite of itself and is a relentlessly depressing and shocking underside look at the lives of poor young men in Eastern Europe. Those brought up on Bel Ami porn who imagine Prague to be a wealthy Eden of gay porn superstars and glamorous gay hustlers will be seriously unsettled by this sometimes ghastly, Vampiric piece.

Marek (Mirek Caslavka) lives with father in rural Czechoslovakia. He's in training to become a welder, like his father, and that's about where his options seem to begin and end. The mother is no longer in the picture, though we never learn what happened to her. Marek breaks into a shop and steals some clothes and the money for a train trip to Prague. When he disembarks there, he encounters the train station hustlers, a lowly group under the thumb of Honza (Pavel Skripal), a leather-clad creep who immediately tricks Marek into his first trick, which just happens to involve some secret Rohypnol and a fat old slag who refers to Marek as a rabbit. Things unravel pretty quickly for Marek from here, as he is taken under the younger, handsomer but not much more responsible wing of David (David Svec), a fellow hustler. They try a bunch of things to maximise their earnings, including shooting low-rent porn and working for different pimps, but things go from bad to worse and it isn't long before heroin and HIV enter the frame.

There's not a lot of optimism in Mandragora, and the purgatorial structure of the third act, which features one false, tragic ending after the next, is quite hard to take. Marek's tricks include a wealthy Englishman who likes to have boys surgically rearranged, without anaesthetic, to look like classical statuary. An American trick drugged and robbed by Marek and David virtually rises from the grave, returning to wreak revenge with a unlubricated pool cue. The junkie eye make-up and fake yellow teeth of the final scenes are about the only distraction from the constant bleakness.

It all balances precariously on the edge of ridiculousness, but somehow it landed on the impressive side for me. The strong acting, including an ensemble made up of actual Prague street hustlers, is a plus, and there's a crumbling, post-Communist authenticity to the locations. The melodramatic pitch and predictable storyline seem to match that particularly Eastern European aesthetic, which reaches for the skies occasionally, but which in the main stays pessimistic and rugged up against the cold.