Run time: 139 mins

The Iberian hills have deadly eyes in Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s outstanding, dread-soaked psychological thriller.

French couple Antoine and Olga have retired from their city lives. Their dream is to revive a rural Spanish mountain village by farming the land and renovating some of its houses. Their neighbours, however, form an insular community who are keen to sell up and hand the land over to a wind farm development. When an argument over planning permission sparks tension between a pair of brothers, a full-blown feud erupts in the Galician hillsides and Antoine and Olga are caught in the crossfire.

Calling to mind Sam Peckinpah‘s Straw Dogs, it’s a film drowning in unease. Sorogoyen is patient, allowing time to set up his story, quietly positioning all of its pieces into place and developing a genuine understanding and empathy towards Antoine and Olga. The pair are merely trying to make the most of a new life but the privilege of their background marks them as outsiders in the eyes of the menacing locals. Class tensions are amped up via a series of escalating micro-aggressions and almost every frame seems loaded with violent possibility, every word spoken with an underlying threat as the film rumbles towards its climactic third act.

A terrific, brutal tale of class warfare, animalistic nature, and devastating consequences