The Stranger

Recent American torture porn has tended to feature fratty college students trespassing in scary foreign countries (see Hostel, Turistas). Frontier(s), a French horror/action hybrid, is less interested in protagonists its target audience will identify with (and, perhaps, find annoying enough that you don't mind seeing them roughed up) than in tapping into some potent sociopolitical imagery. About 10 years in the future, France has elected an ultra-right-wing president (“Now we have our own George Bush,” one kid observes), and Paris is engulfed in fiery riots much like those of 2005. The not-so-good guys are a bunch of mixed-race kids from the banlieues outside of Paris who take advantage of the chaos to attempt a robbery. When their plans go awry, they make for the countryside in a subcompact car, and a family-owned bed-and-breakfast lures them in with the promise of free rooms, alcohol, lascivious daughters… and a racial-purity breeding program. Subtlety goes up in smoke when the patriarch turns out to be a full-blown Nazi, but for a while it’s nice to entertain the fantasy that a film could have both splatter and smarts. By Annie Wagner