This film was released 1st December 2010, and is no longer screening.

This arresting Mexican debut delivers both visceral horror and moral fable in its portrait of a family whose survival rests on picking off the weakest in society. It’s not giving too much away to reveal that the mother and three siblings inhabiting a run-down house in Mexico City are driven by a yearning for human flesh, but after the demise of their beloved father their challenge now is to hunt and gather for themselves. That said, Jorge Michel Grau’s film majors on dread rather then upfront carnage, largely because one suspects the writer-director’s keen to lay out a despairing portrait of his native land, where the marginalised are an easy target for exploitation, and everybody’s on the take. The slightly undercooked plot notwithstanding, blending George Romero’s political edge with Guillermo del Toro’s compassion for both the monsters and their prey makes for a piquant combination that’s as much arthouse as grindhouse.(Notes by Trevor Johnston).