Vinyan Review

Films don't come much darker than this spectacular 'Heart Of Darkness'-style nightmare from Belgian director Fabrice Du Welz, who made the brutal and unpleasant torture thriller Calvaire in 2004.

Inspired by the little-seen 1976 horror film, Who Can Kill A Child? from Spanish director Narciso Ibañez Serrador and teeming with references to everything from Dr. No to Don't Look Now to Apocalypse Now, Village Of The Damned and Blow Up, it remolds its influences to emerge as a brilliantly original quest movie that takes its characters - and the audience - on a one-way journey into hell.

At a charity function, Janet (Emmanuelle Béart) sees footage of the destruction wrought by the Asian tsunami in the villages along the Thai-Burmese border and becomes convinced that a blurred figure in the background of one of the shots is her son, who she believed to have died in the tragedy. With her skeptical husband Paul (Rufus Sewell) reluctantly in tow, she finds an underworld figure willing to smuggle them over the border to begin a search but they soon find themselves lost in remote terrain populated by a tribe of silent staring children.

As much a metaphorical exploration of grief as a literal journey into the unknown, the film starts as a gripping thriller in the seedy underworld of urban Thailand before moving into the lush desolate jungles of Burma, then gradually morphing into a dream world filled with irrational cruelty and violence.