King Of The Hill (El Rey De La Montaña) Review

When we first meet Quim (Sbaraglia), the urban thirtysomething protagonist of King Of The Hill, he is driving in the Spanish countryside, trying to get a signal on his mobile phone. When that fails, he uses the payphone at an isolated service station, but is still unable to get through to his ex-girlfriend Sofia. He is, quite literally, disconnected - and while the film will soon veer into well-worn genre territory, director-writer Gonzalo López-Gallego never allows the theme of human disconnection to get lost in the woods.

In the service station's toilets, Quim makes an unexpected connection - first meeting, and then having spontaneous sex with, an attractive young stranger named Bea (Valverde). This moment of intimacy, however, turns out to have been illusory, as Quim realises that it was a treacherous cover for the theft of his wallet, and so he sets off in pursuit of her down a maze of woodland by-roads, only to find both his car and himself coming under fire from some rifle-toting hunters who are, for their own entertainment, out stalking the most dangerous game.

Later, with a bullet in his leg and his vehicle out of action, Quim will once again find Bea, but as the pair play cat-and-mouse with their murderous assailants, neither they nor we are sure how much trust they should place in each other or in their own humanity.

Normally claustrophobia is associated with enclosed, suffocating locations, but López-Gallego instead turns the wide open spaces of Spain's northern hill country into a source of tightening paranoia. Such adroit handling of tension serves the director well in his film's middle act, which, like his compatriot Koldo Serra's Backwoods (2006), in essence represents a Latin riff on the nature-versus-culture themes that are familiar from Straw Dogs (1971), Deliverance (1972) and Southern Comfort (1981).