Chaos intensifies in Alejandro Landes’s deeply mad thriller about a wild cult of teenage bandits who have rituals, guns and a hostage – but no Kurtz
This overpoweringly tense and deeply mad thriller from Colombian film-maker Alejandro Landes is the best thing I have seen at
Berlin this year: something between Apocalypse Now, Lord of the Flies and Embrace of the Serpent. It depicts a dysfunctional society and guilt-ridden family in miniature, and demonstrates the shifting power dynamics of a cult, the craziness embedded in the minds of child soldiers, the resentments nursed in a military unit without a supervising commanding officer, and the very real danger of eating shrooms grown in cowshit.