Who's in It: Huang Lu
The Basics: A female college student is kidnapped, sold and held in forced-marriage slavery in a remote Chinese mountain village.
What's the Deal? Watching this, you realize that it's just a few short hops down the depravity path until you can connect the dots directly from a blunt foreign-language social-issue film to something heinous like last year's feel-slimy film of the year, Captivity. Now, nobody's force-feeding anybody ground-up eyeballs in this one, but the same sort of helplessness, screaming, bondage and sexual menace are front and center. But this one's main stabs are at the underbelly of China's social mores instead of at the throat of its pretty protagonist.
Why It's Worth Viewing: You get the story from the locked-up woman's perspective, so instead of a flurry of action from the people doing the awful things to her, the movie is sometimes slower than you might want it to be. Because she waits. And waits. And waits.
Who Made It: Li Yang, who directed the equally feel-bad Blind Shaft, about murder and greed in China's illegal mines. So he's not well-liked by government censors in his home country. Which means eventually he'll be banned from filmmaking outright and wind up in France probably.
Other Movies It'll Remind You of: Deliverance, I Spit on Your Grave.