Beginning as a taut Hitchcockian Everyman-on-the-run-from-mysterious-threat chase movie (spiced with sex and intrigue and nicely shot on 16mm), this deceptively understated Spanish thriller ends up as a low key latterday take on WHO COULD KILL A CHILD, another Spanish movie that continues to be influential three decades on. Relatively low in terms of on-screen violence, the film - which makes for an interesting, stylistically very different, companion piece to the forthcoming EDEN LAKE - nonetheless builds an impressive sense of muted horror as the truth about the threat becomes clear.

   Handsome bit of rough Leonardo Sbaraglia is en route to visit his girlfriend when he stops off at a gas station, and he ends up shagging a pretty young shoplifter (Maria Valverde) who subsequently lifts his wallet (though she commendably pays for his gas). Both of them ultimately end up on the run in the wide open Spanish mountains when they come under fire from mystery would-be-assassins lurking on the mountain tops. The cops get involved and perish almost as soon as they arrive on the scene, both Sbaraglia and Valverde get seriously wounded and the threat proves to be two pubescent boys on a thrill-kill rampage.

   The reveal at the core of KING OF THE HILL is cleverly conveyed, with the script’s perspective unexpectedly shifting so that we can spend time with two scarily ordinary youths who, unlike the more overtly nasty and hostile kids of EDEN LAKE, hunt and kill strangers as part of a competitive game (they even have score sheets). The film momentarily takes a first person shooter perspective for some scenes, reinforcing the fact that, to these kids, killing is just a game with no awareness of consequences or morality. Like EDEN LAKE and ILS (THEM), the movie exploits our contemporary concerns over the never-wider generation gap and the notion of youth violence being out of control.

   Parallels to the aforementioned WHO COULD KILL A CHILD are highlighted during an emotionally intense climactic sequence in which the hero has to face up to the fact that, in order to survive, he has no choice but to kill a meek looking child. Director Gallego forsakes visceral horror and overt shocks in favor of an authentic scene of personal devastation : the film fades out on the lone figure of Sbaraglia breaking down in tears at what he has been forced to do. In a period of extreme, in-your-face horror, it’s a quiet but utterly haunting moment.

   In another parallel to EDEN LAKE, this movie’s bad seeds also use their mobile phone cameras to document their mini reign of terror.