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Directed by Gabe. Starring Elena Anaya, Kaiet Rodriguez, Bea Segura, and Andrés Herrera. Mystery-Suspense / Cert. 15

DVD – Optimum – 26 July 2010 - £17.99. Blu Ray - Optimum – 26 July 2010 - £22.99

Screened at FrightFest in 2008, Hierro is a stylish missing child thriller but more a mystery than horror film.

The film exploits a potent and all too believable parental horror, the fear of a parent in a simple lapse of concentration their child could be lost. Single mother Maria (Elena Anaya) is travelling by ferry to the Canary Island of El Hierro with her young son Diego. Maria falls asleep during the journey and awakes to find her son gone. She searches the ferry, her panic and distress growing surrounded by passengers oblivious to her situation. Eventually she manages to alert the ferry crew, but no trace of Diego. When she arrives at her destination, the authorities believe that Diego has simply fallen overboard and drowned, there is no trace of the boy.

Six months later Maria receives the phone call any parent dreads, the body of a young boy has been found on the shores of El Hierro and the police believe it is her son. Maria must travel back to the island to identify the body. However when she does (in a sensitively handled but subtly upsetting scene) Maria tells the island’s police officer that the body is not Diego. From here the plot kicks off, Maria is convinced Diego has been abducted and is somewhere on the island. However the police are convinced her son is dead and that she is unable to accept this. Maria identifies a suspect and thus begins a dangerous amateur investigation.

Hierro is visually stunning, first time feature director Ibáñez has an animation background, and it shows. Subtle visual cues are hidden in the frame (for example a blink and you’ll miss it shot shows the froth in the ferry wake as Maria hunts for the missing boy resemble a skull). Shooting presumably off-season, the island landscape is turned from a sundrenched tourist destination into a threatening desert of black sand and shadows. The central performance of Elena Anaya is committed and often moving. In fact I liked everything about this film… except the plot. The plot is a mix of DON’T LOOK NOW, FLIGHTPLAN and THE ORPHANAGE. In its later sections it becomes increasingly contrived and mechanical before a final act twist which is quite frankly daft, and cheats both the audience and the characters.

Hierro shows Ibáñez as a director of talent to look out for, but this too often feels like work of a talented debut director trying to spice up some flimsy narrative material with flashy technique. It doesn’t work, the base lead of Hierro’s silly story fails to turn into gold no matter how many fancy camera moves Ibáñez throws in.

Extras: only a trailer

Stuart Barr.

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