Hinterland

Its complicated story, hero, and visual style are a great reminder of the beautiful thrillers birthed during the Golden Age of Hollywood, albeit with the help of modern technology to pull it off with a modest indie budget.

The acting is as immaculate as the digitally-augmented settings.

It takes a little while to adjust to the film’s strong and deliberately oppressive stylistic approach, but Hinterland successfully avoids being swallowed up by its own aesthetic via the narrative’s propulsive momentum and the magnetic central performance by Muslu.

As impressive as Homefront is in the way it envisions a distorted world, its fully-realized digital design is all exterior display, whereas Expressionism at its best transforms disturbed psychological states into a nightmarish reality.

If only the story of Hinterland felt as engrossing and alive as its setting.