Who Can Kill a Child?

A Spanish horror film of genuine dread, sun-bleached and deeply upsetting. A couple holiday on a remote island to find it populated entirely by children who have, silently and without explanation, turned on the adults, and the film's central horror is the title's unanswerable question. Narciso Ibanez Serrador directs it with real control.

It opens with several minutes of documentary footage of children killed in twentieth-century atrocities, a framing device that is a hard sell and colours everything after. The bright Mediterranean setting makes the horror worse, not better.

Disturbing, serious and not easily shaken off.