With relentless momentum director Stephen Frears unfolds the story of Sammy the hedonistic, thoroughly English, son of a prominent Pakistani politician, who abandoned the young man and his mother in London years before to seek wealth and power in his homeland. Sammy, who scrapes out a living as an accountant, lives in a dangerous and decaying black neighbourhood with his wife Rosie, a sexually adventurous “modern woman” supportive of fashionable radical issues. Theirs is an open marriage based on, as Rosie puts it, “freedom plus commitment”. Change enters their lives with the arrival of Rafi, Sammy’s long lost father who has been forced to flee his political enemies in Pakistan. Struggling to maintain his self-dignity and his sanity in the terrifying environment of the city he no longer knows, Rafi rapidly becomes disenchanted by Sammy and Rosie’s unanchored world and tolerance of sexual liberty, drugs and revolutionary violence. As the demons of his past return to haunt Rafi, escape is impossible; personal tragedy is inevitable.