The film stars Trevor Eve as Jack Lane, Ralph Brown as Larry Swift and Steven Waddington as Jerry Hoff.
Jack Lane, a murderer who has managed to get away with his crimes and build a new life for himself in suburbia, finds it difficult to give up smoking.
When Lane finds out that the stranger is an investigative journalist who has discovered the truth about his identity, he resolves to take matters into his own hands.
Peter Matthews of Sight and Sound, although celebrating the film's "witty touches", viewed it as offering "scarcely more than dry conceits and tickling wordplay".
[5] Variety, meanwhile, praised Eve's "excellent" performance and conceded that the film was a "much tighter piece of work" than the original edit shown at Cannes, but concluded that it was "a neat idea on paper that doesn't survive its journey to the screen".