Reviewed by Luise Toma.

There are a number of creepy forest films, come to think of it: The Blair Witch Project, Cabin Fever… Forests, it seems, are inherently creepy locations. So now the Spanish want in on the forest actions. They have forests, very nice ones, as you can see in King of the Hill. They also have brave young directors, like Gonzalo López-Gallego, who are all about kicking the Americans off their high-scary forest movie horse.

Quim (Leonardo Sbaraglia) is on his way somewhere—we don't quite know where—when he meets Bea (María Valverde) in a gas station bathroom. Ten minutes later he finds himself without his wallet and lighter, driving angrily towards his destination. He spots Bea's car and follows it—and all goes to hell.

Quim is shot by a random stranger and panics. The road is blocked. The mobile's not working. The car breaks down. The horror. The city man is in the wild with nobody to even give him directions. When chance reunites him with Bea, we glimpse hope that all might end well. Then the terror begins in earnest, chasing our heroes through unfamiliar terrain.

The idea of the invisible hunter and the horrified prey isn't exactly brand new. Still, the haunting landscape of Soria—everyone's next holiday destination, I wager—lends this fairly simplistic plot an extra level of creepiness. This is a corner of the world where you can run like the devil through the deepest woods only to end up in front of a massive rock wall you cannot scale because some faceless villain has shot you in the leg. There are raging waters, deep holes and uprooted trees, yet nothing seems sufficient shelter from the sneaky gunshots that seem to come out of nowhere.

The characters may seem a smidgeon flat on occasion, mainly because we know very little about them, which is probably deliberate, so we can identify with them, put ourselves on their relatively blank canvasses and be scared with them. It works. The atmosphere of the mountain, combined with the increasingly hysterical protagonists makes for some serious nail-biting, and a twist in the end that will seriously freak the hell out of you. However, do not—I repeat, DO NOT—watch the making of the movie before the movie. It may not give the ending away, but it will seriously put you off the actors. Both of them give interviews that leave you with the impression that they have either not seen the movie, or are so far up themselves that the movie becomes secondary to their awesomeness.

King of the Hill is definitely worth a watch, if only to compare the scare tactics favoured by different national cinemas. The Spanish make excellent coming-of-age films and dramas in general, however it is rare to see a Spanish scream-flick. While the hardened fright fan might not be scared out of his or her wits, there will definitely be goosebumps.

King of the Hill
(2008)

Available in Australia through Madman Entertainment.