Night of the Kings

The film may be hard to follow -- CGI elephants stampeding in one minute, IRL news footage appearing the next -- but it's gloriously inventive too. Now, have you heard the one about the Ivorian prison?

Its vivid, genre-fluid investigation of the alchemical art of storytelling definitely hits the mark.

It asks a lot from the viewer, but pays them back two-fold

Mostly it plays like a dream - menacing, surreal, hard to shake even in daylight.

The freshness of the approach, combined with the substance of the stories, works the same strange magic on the viewer as on the inmates. It is easy to be swept along.

It is perhaps too short to fully explore the themes it raises, or even to fully explain them for a wide audience. But when the prisoners fall under the story's spell, it's magical stuff.

The heightened imagination makes this environment feel detailed in a textured way, especially when one sees glimpses of the vivid story being told.

Almost mythical in its telling, Night of The Kings feels unlike anything in cinemas at the moment. Sidestepping the conventions of modern cinema, it's a tense 90 minutes that throws you out at the end, taken aback by what you've just witnessed.

A prison drama like you have never seen, more interested in the act of telling stories than in the stories that take place inside the prison.

It's hard to take your eyes off the screen. [Full review in Spanish]