Harockerce What a beautiful movie!

SpecialsTarget Disturbing yet enthralling

Brendon Jones It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

Edwin The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

johnnyboyz La Noche de los Girasoles, or The Night of the Sunflowers in English, is quite clearly a product of some of contemporary cinema's more recent efforts. The film takes inspiration from, and pays homage to, a number of quality offerings from around Europe and The United States from recent times, while delivering an experience that flicks from the slow burning and ominous to the fast paced and shocking. All this within the realm of a crime-fused world of noir. The film is a quite gripping tale about desperate people in a predicament they should not and do not deserve to be in. But the film adopts a multi-strand approach, although maintains its study of circulation rather well for good measure. The film won me over for its look at greed, retribution, corruption, honour, vigilantism and desperation on a couple of character fronts.The film can be best summed up by observing the opening twenty minutes and closing five. The same individual, whom the film opens and closes with, ambles through the world doing whatever depraved activity he is driven to do, but has no idea of the repercussions they entail. The attitude is a sort of nonchalant one; an attitude that disregards life and what devastation erupts in the wake of it. These emotions and ideas are ones that crop up at various points with a couple of people, most notably individuals to do with disguising a murder and accepting money on an immoral level. These events that are born out of a prior, negative catalyst are created and further spawn scenarios that could lead to further evil or wrong doing. The overall feeling is that evil spawns an event that could spawn further evil and that could spawn an event that might induce evil still. The underlying feeling is that this film looks at a butterfly effect born out of Pandora's Box being opened up.Some of the primary characters in the film are potholers and their task is to explore a recently found cave discovered within a rural Spanish community. This is where the overall iconography to do with the film's study enters the fray. Director Jorge Sánchez-Cabezudo has his characters descend into this dank, grimy, cold, unknown and uncharted space. It's here I feel he draws on parallels with Spain as a nation. His film will be one that goes into Spain as a rural and 'unseen by the tourists' location, an unearthing and a real look at whatever cold and shallow activity, feeling and people lurk within. It is a look at a place no one else ever sees or has seen before. It is iconic of sorts that the location of the cave is used to hide the evidence that bring normal, abiding people down to the level of criminals. This supports the general theory that, if you look hard enough in the most natural and desolate of areas, you may well still be able to find wrongdoing.The film, a Spanish one that continues the recent ascent of cinema in that respective nation, begins with a lone male individual driving to a certain destination. The emphasis on his gaze at a younger girl and the dead body found in the field at the very beginning creates a dangerous image in our minds that this discovery and this man's observing of certain things will only lead to later disaster. Without wanting to give too much away, the film breaks off after its catalyst and draws on themes from 2002's Irréversible, as a film displaying the shocking repercussions individuals realise they are capable of when someone they dearly love is harmed. The film is very briefly a look at raw human emotion as the distinct love for someone boils up with anger and hatred at the person responsible for her harm. A person's limits are tested; what they're prepared to do is pushed and, like Irréversible, it culminates in the murder of someone.Running along-side this tangent is a young local policeman named Tomás (Romero), the same individual who happens to stumble across the potholers and their dead body scenario. His crime within this observant world of sin and evil born out of evil is greed. While initially aiding the innocents caught in the web, in a sort of role reminiscent of Pulp Fiction's clean up man 'The Wolf', the young policeman very quickly becomes aware that he is able to turn these seemingly innocent people in, but will not for a large price. Finally, the film calls on the Coen brothers' masterpiece Fargo when Amadeo (Bugallo), an aging and steady headed police man, is forced into putting all the corruption and wrongdoing together alá the character of Marge Gunderson in said film.I do think The Night of the Sunflowers is genuinely a good film; a film that looks at fate and the evil born out of evil and how certain events and emotions can bring mankind down a level at times of desperation. Sunflowers, as a plant, can keep on growing up and up, spiralling out of control. If this is the 'night of the sunflowers', then it is a time during which scenarios can rapidly grow out of control. Only, it is the human beings in the film that adopt the role of the sunflowers as their emotions and inner-greed aid in the progression of evil and wrong-doing.

Jugu Abraham "When the sunflower plant, Helianthus annuus, is in the bud stage, the head and the leaves do indeed track the path of the Sun. The genus name Helianthus is from the Greek helios "sun" and anthos "flower". Interestingly, however, and contrary to popular belief, once the massive topmost flower opens into the radiance of yellow petals, it slows and then stops moving, ending up permanently facing east." ---Solar flower, New Scientist, 3 August 2002Why am I quoting this interesting trivia? Sunflower buds, we all know, keep moving but a stage comes when it does not move any further. Why am I discussing the night? That's the name of the film. The only teeny-weeny bit about sunflowers in the film But then the sun is not relevant for the night, is it? The near oxy-moronic title give a life to the movie after the film is over—in many ways similar to the disturbing Austrian-French film "Cache" made by Michael Haneke. For a cineaste who can sit through the film right up to the end of the film, the real punch line from the director comes in the form of an audible TV program statement about bees in a beehive, that do not attack unless provoked. This is an innocuous fact but is loaded with meaning in the context of the film's ending. This is a statement heard by the unpunished rapist on the prowl.The Spanish director Sánchez-Cabezudo's film is based on his own script. (He is the latest among formidable Spanish directors making good films based on their own scripts, following the tradition of the gifted directors, Amenabar and Almodovar). Most viewers would appreciate or find good entertainment in the film while mulling over in the different non-linear narrative segments of the story of rape, vigilante killing, extra-marital sex, corruption, village vs urban comparisons, love for a dead spouse. Each segment provides a different Rashomon-type perspective of sections of the same story from a different angle, as seen by a different character. The director uses a technique used in modern pulp literature most recently used by Dan Browne for his book The Da Vinci Code. While the technique might baffle a few, most viewers would derive entertainment as they are constantly challenged to derive the entertainment.The film offers dollops of entertainment ice-cream that most viewers want—-mystery, exploration of new found caves, a rape scene, a brief scene of violent death, and some endearing performances from the actors. If presented as a straight chronological narrative—the story could be made into a typical Hollywood thriller. But why is it different? It is different because of its end.That is where the director and screenplay writer scores a bull's-eye—for a patient viewer who does not leave the theater once he sees the end credits begin to roll. The comment about the bees drive home the uncomfortable, parallel moral issues that Haneke raised in "Cache." Europeans and many of us prefer to retain status quo rather than rake up disturbing moral and social issues. It is convenient for us to do so. It is not because the issues are resolved. In this film the main culprit, a rapist is never brought to justice. If an attempt was made to bring him to justice, three persons would go behind bars for manslaughter, a homicide would surface, the reputation of an erring wife would become public knowledge, a good policeman's daughter would find out that her husband and father of her unborn baby is a corrupt cop and so on. The film is, therefore, not merely a film to be appreciated for its structure but its underpinning question on morality. The film shows us that evil is not limited to a rapist but to the best of us. A good man could do evil in a fraction of a second. And to defend lesser evils, the bigger evil gets away. Only to scar our conscience for ever. Spanish cinema is on the move this decade. Sánchez-Cabezudo's film is good but the post-script in his screenplay is truly formidable. There indeed comes a time these days when "sunflowers" mature, stop turning towards the sun and only face the east. Because it is convenient!

jpschapira I am always amazed at the number of Spanish directors who make movies outside the country and, also, have their movies premiered in various countries. Jaume Collet-Serra with "House of Wax"; Jaume Balagueró and "Darkness"; Alejandro Amenabar with "The Others" and "The Sea Inside"; now a guy with the sequel of "28 Days Later" and, of course, Almodóvar. The fact is that, if you realize, they are surprisingly good at achieving terror (or at least suspense); if you consider the films mentioned above. Well, there's a man named Jorge Sánchez-Cabezudo, and his film "La noche de los girasoles" ("The Night of the Sunflowers" in English) has definitely got some suspense, among other things.To begin with, the screenplay (by the director himself) has an unbelievable earnestness in its way of depicting people that have nothing to do with one another but, because of how small the world is, end up completely connected. How can I not get bored of movies that connect different things that ultimately become one? It's beginning to appear as an overly used technique with screenplays, but Sánchez-Cabezudo's sense of reality lets us forgive this little detail.His ingenuity comes from the fact that he presents each of the situations, with a very sarcastic written sentence in the black screen. Then, he places the characters in a completely remote area of the Spanish country where nothing interesting ever happens…Until now, and it's better if I don't reveal any of the plot; because the events that happen target these people's need for excitement.Try to think that the movie is the typical American 'slasher' where teenagers on the road end up in a deserted town and someone (or something) tries to hunt them down. Now change the teenagers for grown up people, and that 'someone' for nothing. There's no reason why something should be waiting for you in the most boring place; but that's the way 'slashers' think. In this unexciting environment, when one character comes from work, his wife asks how everything went and he has no better answer than: "The same as usual". Actually, this is a phrase that the script didn't even need to include, because the viewer understands the monotony the characters live with immediately. The actors portray all these mixed feelings with accuracy; specially Celso Bugallo as an old cop near retirement, and Vicente Romero as a younger one who, at one point, has to deal with a case while being drunk. The rest of the cast couldn't seem to be more normal than you and me; the kind of people you can imagine existing, with the slight difference that the scary music that plays in the background as they drive wouldn't play in their regular cars."La noche de los girasoles" captures your attention as the director captures the attention of his characters with his simple but original style; because the movie is, if anything, an exercise of perspectives, and one that you won't regret watching.

Joel Segarra This movie is outstanding. The non-linear plot reveals itself little by little taking you by surprise at every turn. It all begins with a rape which already happened a day or two ago. The body is found in the middle of a field of sunflowers. All of this, we get it second hand from TV newscasts while the main characters carry on with their ordinary lives somewhere else. We -the viewers- are lead to follow a caver about to explore a virgin cave near a remote village, his girlfriend, two old disgruntled neighbors on an abandoned village who can't stand each other, a salesman, the disloyal police officer, ... We get to see every character from various viewpoints and how somehow their lives are connected without them knowing yet...And then tragedy and human resolve -call it selfishness or greed- take over everybody's action.The pace of revelation and the acting work like clockworks. This could happen, this is (s)pain after all.Watch out for this guy -the director- for this is his first and for sure it won't be his last.