Spain

The disorientating topography of the Andalusian swamplands provides the backdrop for Marshland, an atmospheric murder mystery from Spanish director Alberto Rodríguez. It opens to a series of spectacular aerial shots, taken from directly above, which transform the landscape into something alien and organic, like brightly coloured brain tissue. Birds and agricultural workers moving across the surface only emphasise the strangeness of the territory, showing how limited the perspective is from ground level. In theory, seeing the bigger picture should add clarity – the film returns to these shots at moments of revelation – but, rather than doing so, it exposes the gaps in the characters’ understanding and seems to suggest that some puzzles are too big to solve.

Family can be a mysterious and dangerous matrix of locked doors and supressed secrets, with loving family members willing to do almost anything to preserve a thin veneer of moral unity. That’s the central premise of Shrew’s Nest, another gory, effective entry in the recent plague of Spanish shock cinema which has infected markets beyond the Iberian motherland. Restricted to one expansive apartment in a post-civil war Madrid, the film unfolds as an interlocking cavalcade of cause and effect, leading to a the illumination of a family’s most brutal and buried secrets.

The Impossible Directed by J.A Bayona Written by Sergio G. Sánchez Spain, 2012 It’s easy to be sceptical about ‘true story’ films. Too often, adaptations of real events contrive and exaggerate genuinely enthralling stories by turning them into blockbuster behemoths for cinematic effect. These films can lean heavily on the promise that the picture will …