Marshland

Spain in 1980, just after the fall of Franco, is the setting for this grim, atmospheric and thrillingly well-made slice of Euro noir. Pedro (Raúl Arévalo) is a Madrid police detective, who, having blotted his copybook after a run-in with a local general, is sent to the dense, poverty-stricken marshlands of Spain's deep south, to investigate the disappearance of two girls. There, alongside fellow cop Juan (Javier Gutiérrez), a hard-bitten lawman with less refined methods and a mysterious past, they slowly unearth a horrific cluster of murders of young women who were all tempted by offers of escape from the godforsaken bayou, and subsequently mutilated and killed. Pleasing echoes of classic Hollywood policers - Chinatown, Blood Simple - abound, and the cast is uniformly excellent, with Gutiérrez particularly striking as a tortured man with a grim secret past. The denouement may be a shade undercooked, but it is the pitch-perfect performances and sharply realised locale, beautifully shot, that renders this unmissable thriller as dense, sinister and murky as its setting.