The film opens as a classic revenge story, as the eponymous Katalin (Hilda Péter) sets out with her young son to hunt the man who raped her years before. Director Peter Strickland eschews the shock tactics and cultish tone so common in rape-revenge movies, however, opting instead to develop a tonally rich cinematic poem. Moreover, rather than cleaving lazily to Manichaean ethics, he weaves a complex, nuanced analysis of a morally intricate scenario. This is not a Ms. 45, or an Irreversible … Katalin Varga harks farther back: to the vengeance tales in the Icelandic Sagas, perhaps; or, more specifically, to the elemental grandeur of Aeschylus' Oresteia. Much of the film's power emerges from the lean, tightly coiled structure of its narrative. The story mainly explores the unsettling milieu formed when Katalin and her son move in with the erstwhile rapist, who now lives in humble diligence with his doting wife. The other key plotline – whereby two men pursue Katalin in order to exact their own revenge, for their brother's murder – is beautifully elliptical. Two brief scenes, plus a few haunting shots of headlights slicing through the night, suffice to tell the brothers' story, and lay the basis for the film's startling conclusion. This final moment of cruelty reveals Strickland's distinctly Aeschylean contention: revenge is never self-contained, but begets a tortuous and inescapable lineage of violence. Strickland's superb storytelling is based in exquisite craft. He makes deft use of colour, perhaps most strikingly in an eerie shot of a scarlet-clad child in a dense green forest. She's the sole witness to Varga's revenge-killing, and the violent colour contrast in her single appearance presages ill... He's likewise at home with bold, painterly compositions. One richly metaphorical vignette, for example, shows Katalin and her son eating soup at a rustic table; each is warmly lit against a cold black backdrop, and the light reflected from a spoon glimmers across the son's face as his mother lovingly watches him. Strickland glosses his elegantly wrought images with a score of throbbing choral drones, investing the dark Carpathian landscape with a bracingly claustrophobic sense of impending doom. His deft control of sound and image beds the story in a palpably atmospheric sense of place. A triumphant debut, from a new British filmmaker with international scope and ambition.