Black Forest review by Anton Bitel

"In the ensuing pandemonium, Aragão proves the old adages that it takes a village to raise a child, and that there is nothing more global than the local. It may start small, but by the end, A Mata Negra has expanded its themes to a universal, apocalyptic scale. The film is bloody bananas (and includes bunches of both in its exuberant narrative), using its limited budget to craft a gorily unhinged world of hell with a diabolically compromised innocent at its centre. In the end, the village’s church, though now in ruins, remains the last, improbable bastion of hope against a path of devilish destruction down which it is all to easy to embark – but it proves far more straightforward to raise the dead than to retrace that path’s twists and turns back to the forest’s Edenic state. For in Aragão’s foundling footage, a community’s moral failings are disinterred, everyone is implicated in their own undoing, and the chickens have well and truly come home to roost."