La Noche de los Girasoles

It was a quiet weekend. I guess I was still very tired from last week (three nights almost without sleep), so when the gang texted yesterday if I was coming out I replied "no, too tired", to which the predictable reply was "old man". Instead, I worked in the garden and read my very good novel / thriller "Cel" by Dutch author Charles den Tex. And today went to an art cinema to watch "La Noche de los Girasoles" (The Night of the Sunflowers), a Spanish thriller, telling the story of the tragic aftermath of an attack on a woman, and set against the backdrop of a dying, depopulated rural town. In the opening episode a vacuum cleaner salesman (sublimely creepy Manuel Moron) rapes Gabi (Judith Diakhate) in an isolated wooded spot as she awaits the arrival of husband Esteban (Carmelo Gomez) and his assistant Pedro (yummie Mariano Alameda), who have traveled to the area to investigate the discovery of a new cave.
Infuriated upon finding Gabi in a state of shock, Esteban and Pedro go in search of the rapist, whom the hysterical Gabi misidentifies as Cecilio (Cesareo Estebanez), one of the two inhabitants of a nearby almost-abandoned village. In a drawn-out scene, Cecilio is accidentally killed.
Tomas (Vicente Romero) is a young civil guard working under Amadeo (Celso Bugallo), to whose daughter Raquel (Nuria Mencia) he is engaged. Desperate to escape the rural future that awaits him, Tomas sees the arrival of the three panicking outsiders as an opportunity. Why deliver justice, he wonders, if nobody is seeking it? But Amadeo smells a rat, and dedicates much of the remainder of the film to unearthing the awful truth.
A good and entertaining movie.