The first horror thriller from Alejandro Amenabar casts Ana Torrent as a student researching a thesis on “audio-visual violence and the family”. When one of her professors dies watching a snuff movie featuring a girl who disappeared from campus two years earlier, Torrent gets into a game of menace with a grad student.
A rawer film than The Others, which later made his name, when it was first released many interpreted it as a film that said as much about the state of Spanish cinema, as it did about violence - the purity of the experience of both being lost the further the audience is removed from the process.
*Watched as a pure movie it is overly long, but the performances are all excellent and there’s quite a bit of meaty unsettling drama. *
