Night of the Sunflowers is an excellent Spanish thriller directed with some class by the debuatant Jorge Sánchez-Cabezudo, who made some acclaimed shorts back in the mid-90s. Influenced by both the ‘backwoods massacre’ genre of the 70s and the multiple viewpoint scripts of Guillermo Arriaga, it’s a gripping, intelligent film that picked up several awards within Spain, but was rather overlooked in the international festival circus.
The narrative recounts events through the eyes of six different characters. A travelling vacuum cleaner salesman (Manuel Moron), who also happens to be a rapist and murderer. Given false directions to a potential lead, he ends up in a small town in the poor, mountainous area of Las Hurdes. Spying an attractive young woman on her own (Judith Diakhate), he tries to assault her. She manages to escape, but is left traumatised, and when she’s picked up by her boyfriend Esteban (Carmelo Gomez) – a geologist researching a newly discovered cave – she points out the first man she happens to see as her attacker. This poor chap is a farmer, one of only two people left in a ‘dying’ village, and is killed during a confused fight.
Understandably freaked, and realising that they may have been responsible for the death of the wrong man, they flag down the first car they see. Unfortunately, this is being driven by Tomas (Vicente Romero), a foolish civil guard who is desperate to escape his unfulfilled life. Spotting a chance to make a lot of money, he suggests that rather than admitting the truth, the cityfolk would be better off hiding the body and, if they pay him a substantial amount of cash, he’ll persuade his boss that the dead man had simply left the village, much like just about everyone else has. Unfortunately, his boss, Amadeo (Celso Bugallo), who also happens to be his father-in-law, is nobody’s fool…
A superbly atmospheric and very well acted ensemble piece, I really can’t recommend this highly enough. It stands in a recent cycle of high-quality European thrillers that are generic, but also work beyond their genres; films like The Lives of Others, The Consequences of Love, Lemming, Hiddenand Spain’s own Intacto. Bizarrely, it has a number of similarities with Hispanic B-Movies from the seventies, many of which also focused on the clash between the urban and the rural poor (Sánchez-Cabezudo has referred to Straw Dogs, but could just have easily been inspired by The Vampire’s Night Orgy or A Candle for the Devil… albeit that the story is initiated by the visitors themselves rather than out of an incompatability with their hosts).
There’s a neat interview with Sánchez-Cabezudo here.
