Hierro

Hierro begins with a nasty car accident, during which the female driver survives but her little son, who sat beside to her when the accident happened, is nowhere to be found…
In a separate incident, single mother Maria loses her young son Diego while traveling by ferry to the island of El Hierro. Has he been abducted or has he fallen overboard? There is no answer to the mystery, so it seems.

Forward six months and Maria – still trying to deal with her terrible ordeal – receives an unexpected phone call. She is asked to return to El Hierro to identify the body of a child that has been found. While the corpse turns out to be not the one of her missing boy, her ordeal is not only set to continue, but to get worse. Her return flight to the mainland has to be delayed for reasons of legality, and Maria finds herself surrounded by malevolent characters that appear to be as strange and threatening as the island’s landscape. During her desperate search for possible clues that might help resolve the mystery, she makes the acquaintance with the very woman whose own son had vanished without a trace after her car accident. Gradually, Maria makes the worst discovery of them all, namely that some mysteries should best be left alone and unresolved…

Hierro has a dreamlike quality to it, with echoes of Pan’s Labyrinth and The Orphanage. The pace is deliberately slow and interspersed with surreal sequences, to emphasize the mental state of Maria after the disappearance of her son. Like so many Spanish fantastical films of recent years, Hierro is a psychological horror that creates an atmosphere of terror without the need for blood and gore. Elena Anaya in the role of Maria is particularly impressive in delivering the emotional range that her part requires. Although at times the film is almost too slow moving, and the real threat here seems to come from the bizarre and bleaks landscape of the island.
The film is in Spanish language with English subtitles.