Winner of the ‘Best Foreign Film’ award at last year’s New York Independent Film Festival, Madrid-born director Gonzalo L’pez-Gallego’s startling micro-budget first feature tells of four isolated outcasts. In a grey urban landscape, man-child Alex (Manuel Sanchez Romos) lives and works in a dank garage, venturing out only to bludgeon stranded motorists to death with a huge lug wrench before returning to a big glass of milk and bed. Encountering miscreant siblings Calvo (Pablo Menasanch) and Pedro (Pedero Rojas), who’ve kidnapped lonely waif Sara (Diana Lazaro), the demented mechanic is presented with a unique opportunity of not just human interaction, but heroism.
With nods to David Lynch, Michael Haneke and Michael Powell, L’pez-Gallego employs an indie aesthetic that combines beautiful, eerie cinematography with extremely sparse dialogue and bursts of industrial noise. The results make for a world of overtly threatening detail, from the blank labels on everything in a store to the perpetually fogged car windows and Alex’s unexplained ritual of propping his victims behind the wheel with their hands on the horn before smashing the windshield with his wrench. Highly stylised and resolutely bizarre, Nomads seems destined for cult status.

2001. English subtitles. Colour. Dolby digital stereo. 95 mins