Estomago

A poorly fortified house, the windows barricaded with what look like pieces of broken furniture. A bandaged man dining alone, looking at a picture of the woman he loves. Zombies breaking in. We've been here before, haven't we? It may look that way, but Estomago has a twist outside the usual confines of the genre and is surprisingly moving as a result.

The clues are there. The man's wounds; the cables tangling together his network of monitoring screens; the uncanny nature of his foes, who mutate and rise up again from pools of spilled blood. But it's Dan Bronchinson's performance that really carries it and gives it that important human quality. Keeping it simple, unpretentious, he invites viewers to come closer than they might ordinarily dare to.

The dirty, grimy look of the film is a difficult thing. It's believable, appropriate, yet it sometimes detracts from the visual impact of the horrors our hero encounters. A weak, repetitive score exacerbates the problem. But the monsters themselves are very effective - superbly so for such a low budget production - and there are some genuinely creepy moments.

Estomago takes viewers on a nightmare journey before bringing those horrors home. Worth checking out.