davidmantle
A good story, even though reminders of Deliverance and Straw Dogs, with a good atmosphere. I like the scene near the beginning where the locals slag off the visitors not knowing that Oldman speaks fluent Spanish. The faces were a bloody picture. I also can understand why the locals segregate the girl through ignorance, was surprised though by the lead villains attitude. A darn good film well worth a watch. For my money the combination of Oldman and Considene is pure magic - they work so well together.
MattyGibbs
A small thriller starring Gary Oldman and Paddy Considine sounded too good to be true when I chanced upon it recently and unfortunately it is. Two couples on a Spanish holiday chance upon an imprisoned girl in an abandoned house, take her in and then find trouble from the locals when they find they have taken her. The opening half hour is very tedious and better casting of the female characters would have been preferable as the relationships between the two couples just didn't ring true. Even Gary Oldman and Paddy Considine are pretty lacklustre. Once the girl was found I did expect things to liven up but sadly it clumsily plods on at a sedate pace with random acts of savagery thrown in. There was surprisingly an almost total lack of tension which bearing in mind the plot is pretty unforgivable. This is nicely filmed but is a very disjointed and disappointing effort and not one I would recommend.
wpsandberg-1
This piece of Doo-Doo should have been left on the shelf, to call it art is to call a polished turd ART! Watched it from start to finish and felt like I had just watched nothing. Who does the little girl belong to? Why is she in the house locked up? Who are all these guys looking for her? What's the bit between the couple where she's an ice cube? There's so much left hanging this thing was a complete flop. At the end of the film I'm waiting for some explanation as to what I just watched and get nothing, is Oldman dead? What's with the "I can't find my nickers" when their swimming, OK if not did someone take them and if so who and why, this thing is nothing but a bunch of ?????
Rathko
Sometime in the 1970s, two Englishmen and their Spanish wives hope to overcome the difficulties in their relationships with a vacation at a family home in rural Basque country. When the guys go hunting and rescue a young girl held captive in an abandoned farmhouse, it's only a matter of time before the locals come looking for her. 'Bosque de Sombras' clearly takes Peckinpah's 'Straw Dogs' as its model, exploring the same themes of power and masculinity through a sexually provocative wife and her weak and ineffectual husband. Only the psycho-sexual dynamic is played out against the unspoken backdrop of Franco's dictatorship instead of the Vietnam War. Unfortunately, these socio-political underpinnings, which made Peckinpah's 1971 classic so powerful, are lost in 'Bosque de Sombras' not only through the lack of any real sense of the era but a reluctance to define the characters in the broad strokes necessary for political commentary. Even the attempt itself begs the question: just how relevant is a critique of the insular superstitions of Franco's Spain? So we're left with a pretty routine genre thriller of backwoods crazies running amok. The cast and crew do an excellent job (particularly the always brilliant Oldman), the forest locations are beautifully ripe and foreboding, and the movie is suspenseful and thoroughly entertaining, but any attempts to achieve something greater are ultimately held back by a screenplay that dares not deliver on its thematic philosophy.
AD
