Sometime in the 1970s, two Englishmen and their Spanish wives hope to overcome the difficulties in their relationships with a vacation at a family home in rural Basque country. When the guys go hunting and rescue a young girl held captive in an abandoned farmhouse, it's only a matter of time before the locals come looking for her. 'Bosque de Sombras' clearly takes Peckinpah's 'Straw Dogs' as its model, exploring the same themes of power and masculinity through a sexually provocative wife and her weak and ineffectual husband. Only the psycho-sexual dynamic is played out against the unspoken backdrop of Franco's dictatorship instead of the Vietnam War. Unfortunately, these socio-political underpinnings, which made Peckinpah's 1971 classic so powerful, are lost in 'Bosque de Sombras' not only through the lack of any real sense of the era but a reluctance to define the characters in the broad strokes necessary for political commentary. Even the attempt itself begs the question: just how relevant is a critique of the insular superstitions of Franco's Spain? So we're left with a pretty routine genre thriller of backwoods crazies running amok. The cast and crew do an excellent job (particularly the always brilliant Oldman), the forest locations are beautifully ripe and foreboding, and the movie is suspenseful and thoroughly entertaining, but any attempts to achieve something greater are ultimately held back by a screenplay that dares not deliver on its thematic philosophy.
Review of The Backwoods
