It certainly doesn’t sound promising: a film of a British stage musical, its lyrics taken verbatim from interviews with the neighbors of a serial killer. Yet the result — directed by Rufus Norris and setting words collected by Alecky Blythe against music by Adam Cork — is mesmerizing.

The real case involved a forklift operator who, over six weeks in 2006, killed five prostitutes who were working his street in Ipswich. The cast includes Olivia Colman (“The Night Manager”) as a local, and Tom Hardy as a cab driver obsessed with serial killers.

You won’t find much to hum, and the movie sticks to the indie visual playbook: grim palette for grim scenes, a surfeit of close-ups. The skill here is in the tonal control. These ordinary Brits can be likable and comic, or paranoid and shockingly callous.