The Untamed

In a small Mexican city, a couple in a failing marriage and the wife's gay brother become entangled with a woman who tends a tentacled alien organism, kept in a cabin, that offers overwhelming physical pleasure and, eventually, consumption.

Amat Escalante, a serious art-house director, made a Tarkovsky-influenced fusion of domestic realism and cosmic horror, in which the creature is a literalisation of desire that the characters cannot resist even as it destroys them.

It is slow, explicit and deeply strange, and its real subject is repression, machismo and the violence of a society that cannot accommodate desire.

It won the Silver Lion for direction at Venice, which is not where horror films usually end up.

The opening shot, of the creature and a woman, tells you immediately this is not a conventional monster film. It is closer to Zulawski than to anything American.