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Middle-class incomers to a remote village in Spain’s ‘wild west’ expose fear, resentment and nationalism in Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s disturbing true-crime drama

Here is a fierce, bitter tale with a flinty sharpness: partly a social-realist drama of class and xenophobia, and partly a rural noir horror, a Euro-arthouse twist on Straw Dogs or Deliverance. It’s inspired by the true story from 2010 of a middle-class hippy idealist Dutch couple who attempted to settle in the Spanish village of Santoalla in Galicia’s remote “wild west” and fell out badly with their neighbours over their gentrification plans: a row that escalated into a nightmare. It has in fact already been the subject of a documentary, Andrew Becker and Daniel Mehrer’s Santoalla, and has now been fictionalised by film-maker Rodrigo Sorogoyen.

Denis Ménochet and Marina Foïs play Antoine and Olga, an educated French couple who have moved into the area...

"And what do you think happened?" Oscilloscope Labs has debuted an official trailer for the acclaimed documentary Santoalla, described as a "a true crime film as gripping as Making a Murderer or Serial." The intimate documentary tells the story of a Dutch couple, Martin and Margo Verfondern, who moved to a remote Spanish village on the island of Santoalla to start a new life living off of the land. Things seemed to be great at first but eventually they had some conflicts with the local Spanish residents, and then one day Martin disappeared. This doc tries to investigate what happened and looks back at the story of this couple and their desire for a good life. "As this once forgotten landscape is thrust into the center of controversy, Margo finds herself searching not only for answers, but for the strength to persevere." This looks a bit scary. Here's the trailer...