BUY ME A GUN ****

A horror movie but not in the way you might think. "Buy Me a Gun" could just as easily be called 'Field of Nightmares', set as it is around a deserted baseball camp used by Mexican drug cartels and looked after by Rogelio and his young daughter Huck who has to wear a mask to hide her identity. It's a terrifying film about simple, everyday violence from which no-one, particularly children, is safe. At the beginning we hear the voice of little Huck telling us that everything in the film is real and it certainly feels that way. Huck's dad is a drug addict and it's in drugs, not money, that the cartel pay him for looking after the field but as Huck observes, he's also lucky and that's why he's survived.

As you can imagine, Julio Hernandez Cordon's film is not an easy watch. As Huck has said, the horrors it shows are indeed real. Children are chained up in cages, tortured and mutilated and it's only the film's almost surreal nature and Cordon's use of colour that allows us to keep watching; a more realistic treatment would be unbearable. This is a remarkable film by a remarkable talent.