May God Save Us

Set against the pending visit of Pope Benedict XVI, anti-austerity protests and Madrid’s viscerally hot summer of 2011, two hard-boiled police inspectors – Luis Velarde (Antonio de la Torre, The Fury of a Patient Man SFF17) and Javier Alfaro (Roberto Àlamo, The Skin I Live In) are on the trail of a suspected serial killer.

This impressively tense cat-and-mouser stands in a league of its own as a mesmerising study of characters, with detectives Alfaro and Verde finding they have more in common with their murderer than they’d like to admit. From the perspective of the investigation, the film changes to that of the killer as it enters its final, nail-biting stretch.

Partnering with his regular screenwriter, Isabel Peña, filmmaker Rodrigo Sorogoyen is proving a dab hand in depicting complex psyches, twisted behaviour and murky atmospherics.

May God Save Us may recall for some the work of David ‘Se7en’ Fincher, featuring a graphic crime tableaux that seers itself in the memory banks.