Consistency has never been Pedro Almodóvar's strong suit. Thus, for every Talk to Her (2002) and Volver (2006), there has been a Bad Education (2004) or a Broken Embraces (2009). The Skin I Live In, the 18th feature the Spanish auteur has produced since making his debut three decades ago, is unusual in that it is neither a masterpiece nor a misfire. Indeed, it's possibly the most intermediate movie that Almodóvar has made since Live Flesh, which is somewhat apposite, as while that 1997 tale of lust, disability and vengeance was adapted from a thriller by Ruth Rendell, this study of treachery, isolation and sexual identity derives from Thierry Jonquet's novel, Tarantula.

Despite the fact that he has himself undergone nine successful treatments, the room is full of sceptics when plastic surgeon Antonio Banderas announces he has created a skin substitute, named Gal after the wife who chose to die after being hideously burned in a car crash rather than be subjected to her husband's scalpel. But while the assembled scientists and academics have every right to doubt, the audience is already aware of the experiments that Banderas has been conducting at El Cigarral, the Toledo estate where he is ensconced with housekeeper Marisa Paredes and captive guest-cum-guinea pig, Elan Anaya.

Clad in a garment that both protects her body and serves as a blank canvas for Banderas's inspiration, Anaya had made several attempts to seduce her captor and kill herself. However, she remains in her windowless room under the influence of opium and the close surveillance of Paredes, who warns Banderas that he risks losing her as he did others before her.

We don't have to wait long to understand the significance of her words, as Roberto Álamo arrives unexpectedly in a carnival tiger costume and claiming both to be Paredes's son and to need a facial transformation as he has just robbed a jewellery store. Álamo also has a history with Banderas and an altercation sparks a series of flashbacks focusing on the doctor's daughter, Blanca Suárez, which chronicle her relationship with the eager Jan Cornet and reveal how Banderas first encountered Anaya.

As one might expect of such a luridly sensationalist storyline, there are twists aplenty before the inevitable denouement. But Almodóvar seems uncertain whether to play them sinisterly straight or with a macabre slant on his trademark campness. Consequently, this variation on Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face (1960) has moments redolent of Jess Franco, José Larraz and José Bénazéraf, as well as of Fritz Lang, Luis Buñuel and Alfred Hitchcock. The influence of sculptor Louise Bourgeois is also readily evident in Antxon Gomez's forbidding, but richly coloured interiors, which are lustrously photographed by José Luis Alcaine.

But, just as the visuals tone down the terror, so does the script written by Almodóvar and his brother Augustín. Thus, even though it cleverly shifts the narrative emphasis away from Banderas and onto Anaya, the scenario lacks psychological edge or a sense of physical revulsion that David Cronenberg would surely have stressed in one of his `body horror' outings. Nonetheless, the performances are strong, with Banderas fully justifying the reunion with his mentor after a 21-year hiatus, Anaya managing to convey fragility and tenacity through her bandages, and Paredes delivering a display of unhinged devotion that recalls Judith Anderson in Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940).

The mood is very different in Daniel Monzón's fourth feature, Cell 211, a prison picture that falls somewhere between Jacques Audiard's A Prophet (2009) and Craig Viveiros's Ghosted (2011) where authenticity is concerned, but errs much closer towards the latter in terms of credibility. Thanks to some tough performances and cinematographer Carles Gusi's expert exploitation of the claustrophobic confines of a decommissioned gaol, this achieves decent levels of tension when the action takes place behind bars. But in inserting domestic flashbacks and sequences depicting the official response to a combustible riot, Monzón dilutes the atmosphere and allows melodrama to replace suspense.

Arriving a day early to demonstrate commitment to his new post, prison guard Alberto Ammann is struck on the head by a chunk of collapsed ceiling during a tour of the premises and is rushed to Cell 211 for treatment. Unfortunately, while he is unconscious, Luis Tosar leads a mutiny against the regime and Ammann is forced to pass himself off as a newly transferred inmate when he is brought before Tosar and his thuggish cohorts Vicente Romero and Luis Zahera. However, Tosar not only buys his story, but also takes him into his confidence, as he explains how he hopes to use the Basque separatists held in a different wing as bargaining tools with the authorities, as they will not want an already fraught situation to acquire a political significance.

While Ammann keeps his wits about him, his pregnant wife, Marta Etura, arrives at the prison to check he is okay and Monzón contrasts her fears with the simmering resentments of guard Antonio Resines. However, in trying to juggle multiple plotlines and leaven the onerous political subtext with some good old-fashioned uniformed brutality, Monzón rather loses control and the action ultimately descends into rapidly cross-cut chaos. One anticipates that the proposed Paul Haggis remake will avoid such pitfalls, although a slick Hollywood version is also likely to sanitise the scuzzier aspects of the stand-off and it's difficult to see anybody matching Tosar's muscular mix of bullet-headed grit and fatal sensitivity or emulating Ammann's deft avoidance of the heroics that most American leading men would prioritise among their contractual stipulations.

The focus switches from the punishment to the crime in Amat Escalante's Los Bastardos (2008), an uncompromising insight into the Mexican immigrant experience in Southern California that takes its cues from the works of Michael Haneke, Bruno Dumont and co-producer Carlos Reygadas. Retaining the largely static shooting style that informed Escalante's 2005 debut, Sangre, this may be a bit too spartan for genre fans and too callous for arthouse audiences. Nevertheless, Escalante should be commended for refusing to compromise his distinctive aesthetic.

Twentysomething Jesus Moises Rodriguez and his teenage pal Rubén Sosa are finding it tough to make a living in the United States. They kick a ball around with other illegals waiting to be hired for a day's labouring and join in the angry trash talk about the gringos who exploit and slight them. Eventually, the pair agree to dig a ditch for a pittance for construction boss Kenny Johnston and are subsequently picked on in the park by Aron Briggs and his barbecuing redneck buddies. However, the Mexicans refuse to rise to the baiting, as they have another job to do before they can sleep.

Across town, single mom Nina Zavarin is having dinner with surly son Trevor Glen Campbell, who is too obsessed with his electronica to pay her much heed other than to scoff at her accusation that he is doing drugs. Ironically, of course, she is and smokes herself into oblivion with a crack pipe. However, she is awoken by the sound of intruders and finds herself playing hostess to Rodriguez and Sosa before they shoot her.

Realising the killers have been sent by her estranged husband, Zavarin tries to gain their trust by feeding them microwaved meals, allowing them to swim in the pool and sharing her drug stash. She even steels herself to accept their clumsy sexual advances. But she has misunderstood both their attitude to their mission and their hatred of everything she stands for. Thus, when offering them more money than her spouse had paid them fails to deflect their purpose, she knows she has to act quickly and two shots ring out.

Escalante lets Matt Uhry's camera linger on the gruesome outcome to drive home the senselessness of the slaughter. But, while these shocking images leave a deep impression, they are somewhat undermined by the over-reliance on what are tantamount to caricatures of both Mexicans and Americans. This may well have been Escalante's purpose, but the political and psychological power is undeniably depleted by the sketchy delineation of a screenplay (written by the director and his brother Martín) whose clumsy didacticism extends to the fact that the protagonists are called Jésus and Fausto.

The pace is even slower and the action considerably less visceral in Lisandro Alonso's Liverpool (2008). The Argentine had already established himself as a master of minimalism with Hawksian fixation with men going about their business with La Libertad (2001), Los Muertos (2004) and Fantasma (2006). However, he perfects his distinctive brand of non-drama with this uncompromising odyssey, which follows mariner Juan Fernández on a voyage across the Atlantic and then across the frozen wastes of Tierra del Fuego. Lucio Bonelli's picks out the flashes of red in Gonzalo Delgado's production design, but that's the only link with the eponymous port in this sombre study of introspection and insignificance.

Largely keeping to himself on a freighter heading for Cape Horn, Fernández is surrounded by complex control consoles, giant pieces of machinery and colossal containers that reinforce how little he matters to either the running of the vessel or his crewmates. Convincing the captain that he has to see his sick mother, Fernández disembarks at Ushuaia and heads for a tiny village in the Martial mountains. His progress is periodically interrupted by fearsome drinking bouts that culminate in him sleeping it off in abandoned buses or shacks. Eventually, however, he makes it home and is upbraided by father Nieves Cabrera for neglecting his daughter, Giselle Irrazabal. But no sooner has he made her acquaintance than Fernández is making tracks, leaving Irrazabal clutching a few banknotes and a keyring as a souvenir of his visit.

Whether self-effacing in the ship's leisure lounge, slumping in a strip club, riding a logging truck or failing miserably to communicate with his family, Fernández is the personification of misfitting anti-hero. But it's the way in which Alonso locates him within his landscape that accentuates his unimportance to the great scheme of things and, thus, makes his abnegation of duty towards the one person in the world who actually needs him all the more disconcerting. Meticulously made and rigorously controlled (yet exuding discreet humanism), this is the latest in the long line of films to explore Jean Renoir's trusted maxim from La Règle du jeu (1939) that everyone has their reasons.

The form is less significant than the content in Life, Above All, Oliver Schmitz's thoughtful adaptation of Allan Stratton's acclaimed novel, Chanda's Secrets. Handsomely photographed by Bernhard Jasper to capture the harsh beauty of the countryside around the township of Elandsdoorn, this could easily be accused of toning down such contentious issues as poverty, infant mortality, child prostitution and the South African's government's continued failure to face up to the gravity of the AIDS pandemic. But Schmitz and screenwriter Dennis Foon could also be lauded for trying to alert the wider world to the Rainbow Nation's very real problems.

Twelve year-old Khomotso Manyaka always thought her neighbours would do anything to help each other. But when her baby sister dies, she discovers that nobody is willing to assist her make the funeral arrangements. Indeed, all anyone wants to discuss is her HIV+ stepfather Aubrey Poolo's drinking and mother Lerato Mvelase's declining health. Realising she already has a task on her hands raising troublesome half-siblings Mapaseka Mathebe and Thato Kgaladi, Manyaka confides her worries to Keaobaka Makanyane, an orphaned classmate who has incurred the wrath of the church congregation by abandoning her studies to become a prostitute at the nearby truck park.

When the local sangoma witch-doctor declares that Mvelase is suffering from a curse, the chorus of disapproval grows so loud that community elder Harriet Manamela persuades her to leave for her Tiro home in order to make amends with sister Tinah Mnumzana, who has never forgiven her for turning down an arranged marriage to elope with Manyaka's father. However, on seeing the hatred that these supposed Christians extend towards Makanyane after she is beaten up by some clients, Manyaka realises that ignorance of AIDS and not compassion had prompted Manamela's suggestion and she sets out to find her mother and bring her back where she belongs.

But, having endured the prejudice of her aunt and grandmother, her return only enrages the hypocritical gossips, who insist that Mvelase is stoned. However, Manamela is so ashamed by her behaviour that she shares the secret of her own son's death with Manyaka and they stand together in the face of prejudice and fear.

Schmitz largely eschews sentimentality in telling his tale with a simplicity that, while never subtle, is certainly affecting. The debuting Manyaka is splendidly spirited as the devoted daughter, who cannot understand why people who proclaim goodness act in precisely the opposite way. She is ably supported by Mvelase, Makanyane and Manemela, as well as by the shiftless Poolo, who forever props up a bar with former lover, Kgomotso Ditshweni, before he succeeds in posthumously doing something to benefit his family.

The triumph of humanity over religious extremism and ignorant bigotry is entirely predictable, while some may find the tone preachy and the uplifting finale a touch contrived. But how else would either the caring and intrepid Manyaka find the strength to go on or the film hope to make an impression, particularly on the South African viewers who desperately need to heed its message.

A little-seen side of Kenya is explored in Susanne Bier's In a Better World, which won the 2011 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. As in After the Wedding (2006), Bier uses a Third World scenario to draw comparisons with events back in Denmark. However, the barbarous actions of a tribal warlord and the errant schemes of a grieving schoolboy are rather mismatched examples of priapean violence in an otherwise commendable discussion of pacifism, loyalty, bullying and retribution.

Swedish medic Mikael Persbrandt works in a field hospital in a remote part of Kenya and frequently has to perform emergency surgery on pregnant women who have been cut open by the brutal Evans Muthini to check on the sex of their babies. Persbrandt's estranged wife Trine Dyrholm is also a doctor at a hospital in Denmark, where their elder son Markus Rygaard is being bullied at school by Simon Maagaard Holm and this injustice stings new student William Jøhnk Nielsen, who has come to live with grandmother Elsebeth Steentoft following the recent death of his mother that has strained his relationship with workaholic father, Ulrich Thomsen.

Nielsen beats Holm with a bicycle pump and threatens him with a knife, but avoids censure when headmistress Bodil Jørgensen simply suggests the trio shake and make up. But Nielsen feels empowered by his stance and, when mechanic Kim Bodnia slaps Persbrandt for protecting son Toke Lars Bjarke in a playground scuffle with his own boy, he refuses to accept that turning the other cheek is a manly gesture and begins plotting to blow up Bodnia's van with pipe bombs fuelled by firework gunpowder.

Meanwhile, Persbrandt has returned to Africa, where, despite the misgivings of his staff, he is forced to treat Muthini for a leg wound. However, when he begins abusing fellow patients, Persbrandt snaps and allows the locals to take their revenge on the now-defenceless tyrant. Consequently, Persbrandt is preoccupied when Rygaard skypes him that night and, thus, misses the opportunity to prevent the explosion that will land his son in hospital, after he rushes to warn some passing joggers of the imminent danger.

The melodramatic escalation of events is undoubtedly the weakest aspect of Bier and Anders Thomas Jensen's screenplay. Yet, such is the intensity of the performances that this remains disconcertingly compelling. The steely eyed Nielsen and the brace-wearing Rygaard are particularly impressive as the boys reacting in confusedly different ways to their father's absenteeism, while Persbrandt ably conveys the conflicts of a man whose personal and professional codes are compromised by the cowardly deeds of others. However, Dyrholm and Thomsen are rather marginalised, with subplots involving her bitterness at Persbrandt's infidelity and his pain at his dying wife's cruelty going largely unexplored.

Cinematographer Morten Søborg evocatively contrasts the African bush and Danish coastal vistas, although his penchant for closing in on the characters heightens the dramatic tension with only marginally more subtlety than Johan Söderqvist's rather obvious score. But such tactics are typical of a didactic picture that seems to allow all but Muthini to escape the consequences of their actions. Moreover, by focusing so schematically on the notion of violence begetting violence, Bier neglects such other potentially intriguing themes as male responses to bereavement, class and racial antagonisms, the role of schools in providing moral guidance and the still patronising attitude of supposedly civilised societies to the developing world.

Fleeing the scene of a crime is also the theme of Eric Lartigau's The Big Picture, a bold adaptation of a Douglas Kennedy novel that swaps New York and Montana for Paris and a backwater in Montenegro. Once again demonstrating what a fine screen actor Romain Duris is becoming, this existential drama delves deeply into notions of identity, ambition and responsibility to oneself and others. But it never quite resolves its plausibility issues and, as a consequence, is less engrossing than the Patricia Highsmith Ripley novels that would appear to be its obvious inspiration.

Lawyer Romain Duris should be content with his lot. He runs a successful firm with Catherine Deneuve and adores his two children with trophy wife Marina Foïs. However, soon after learning that Deneuve has only months to live, Duris discovers that Foïs has been sleeping with photographer neighbour Eric Ruf and his perfect world begins to fall apart.

After making a scene at a dinner party, Duris decides to confront Ruf about the affair. However, the discussion gets out of hand and he accidentally kills his rival in a scuffle and is suddenly confronted with the dual prospect of losing everything has and saddling his sons with the ruinous reality of having a killer for a father.

Concluding that the former is the lesser of two evils, Duris hides Ruf's corpse and uses emails and texts to create the impression that Ruf is still alive, but out of easy contact, by announcing that is heading off on a remote travel assignment. Duris then fakes his own death and starts driving east until he finally reaches a sleepy town on the Montenegrin coast, where he rents in a house in the hope that the residents are incurious about the newcomer in their midst.

In order to survive, Duris decides to use Ruf's equipment to set himself up as photographer and, in the process, fulfil the youthful dream he abandoned to study law. However, he soon finds himself more in demand than he envisaged, as drunken ex-pat news editor Niels Arestrup persuades picture editor Branka Katic to hire Duris and his work attracts so many positive notices that he is awarded an exhibition. Torn between enjoying the acclaim and dreading it creating the internet buzz that could expose him, Duris elects to take his chances.

But the sight of his pictures on the wall of the crowded gallery unnerves him and he flees in panic. Distraught at losing his only snapshot of his kids in torching his car, Duris secures a passage on a cargo ship leaving a nearby port. However, noises in the night lead to a fateful discovery.

Despite the best efforts of Lartigau and co-scenarist Laurent de Bartillat to meld Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger (1975) and Jacques Audiard's The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005), this is a picture with frustrating plotting and pacing problems. Yet, such is the intensity of Duris's performance that it's easy to suspend disbelief as his carefully laid plans threaten to unravel and he starts to succumb to the self-loathing that had alienated Foïs.

By focusing so relentlessly on Duris's inner turmoil, Lartigau ably conveys the agony of regret. But he also compellingly explores the stress of maintaining the façade of a new identity in the face of internet omniscience and this sense that there is nowhere to hide in a shrinking world is one of the film's most disconcerting aspects. Laurent Dailland's prowling camera and Olivier Radot's claustrophobic production design heighten this aura of unease, which is further reinforced by Evgueni and Sacha Galperine's unsettling score. But, with so many secondary characters seeming to exist solely to exacerbate Duris's difficulties, the focus is cast unremittingly on a deeply flawed anti-hero who isn't entirely worthy of sympathy.

Lola Créton's confinement is more of her own choosing in Catherine Breillat's Bluebeard. Imparting a feminist spin on the Charles Perrault fairytale, this is a perplexing, but low-key provocation from one of France's most consistently contentious film-makers. Cross-cutting between the 17th century and the 1950s, the action explores the themes of sibling rivalry, dastardly suppression and naive curiosity. But, with Breillat mixing enchantment and terror, this always feels more deceptively mischievous than menacing.

On learning of their father's death while attempting to save a child from the wheels of a passing carriage, teenage sisters Daphné Baiwir and Lola Créton are expelled from their convent school and forced into a period of mourning by their despairing mother, Isabelle Lapouge. Having witnessed their possessions being seized by avaricious neighbours, the family is forced to live on grass soup. Consequently, Créton is keen to accept an invitation to the castle of local nobleman Dominique Thomas, even though he is reputed to be hideously ugly and have murdered three wives, as well as being responsible for the disappearance of several virginal maidens.

Meanwhile, in the musty attic of their new home, pre-pubescent sisters Lola Giovannetti and Marilou Lopes-Benites begin reading Perrault's fable after growing bored with the bric-a-brac strewn around the room. Despite being the younger, Lopes-Benites delights in showing off her hilariously skewed knowledge and cheerfully spouts opinions on everything from ogres and school grades to marriage turning people homosexual, as they follow the story.

Back in once upon a time France, Créton leaves Baiwir dancing with her friends and finds Thomas snoozing alone in the woods. He is charmed by her prattle and seats her beside him during a grand outdoor banquet. They marry soon afterwards, with Créton displaying remarkable sang froid, first as she accepts Thomas's ring in a vast chapel and then as she refuses to sleep in a cot at the foot of his bed and insists on being given her own room. She selects a closet that is too small for the gargantuan groom to fit inside, but Créton isn't afraid of her clumsily doting husband and marvels at his insights into music, astronomy, nature and literature.

However, he is disappointed with her when he returns from a month-long sojourn to find she has filled the castle with her friends. Thus, before embarking on his next journey, he entrusts her with a small golden key and forbids her to go inside the room it locks. Returning within a day, he is fully aware that the disconcerted Créton has disobeyed him and discovered the secret of his charnel house. But his love for her causes him fatally to delay her execution and Créton fulfils her desire to be fabulously rich.

Revelling in the thrill of the illicit and perilous and the resourcefulness of spirited females, Breillat springs two surprises - one involving Créton's replacement by Lopes-Benites for the ghoulish exposure of Thomas's crimes and the other a gaping hole in the attic floor.

Recovering from a stroke, Breillat harks back to her own girlhood for the `modern' segment, while the period sequences recall both Walerian Borowczyk's Blanche (1971) and The Beast (1975) and Angela Carter's 1979 novel, The Bloody Chamber. But this is nowhere near as shocking as previous outings like Romance (1999) and À ma soeur (2001), despite a hideous sequence depicting the death throes of a decapitated goose.

Vilko Filac's HD imagery ably contrasts the look and feel of the two eras. However, the real distinction lies in the tone of the performances, with Baiwir and Créton adopting a measured courtliness that seems entirely scripted, while Giovannetti and Lopes-Benites's squabbling babble feels more improvised. Breillat's characters usually employ a declamatory style and her sisters are invariably at each other's throats. Consequently, many will anticipate the traumatic ending of the autobiographical strand. But while a sense of danger stalks the historical episodes (with its daringly revisionist take on the Lolita myth and predatory grooming), it's evident from Créton's merciless tirade against Mother Superior Farida Khelfa that Bluebeard has finally met his match.

Vilko Filac's HD imagery ably contrasts the look and feel of the two eras. However, the real distinction lies in the tone of the performances, with Baiwir and Créton adopting a measured courtliness that seems entirely scripted, while Giovannetti and Lopes-Benites's squabbling babble feels more improvised. Breillat's characters usually employ a declamatory style and her sisters are invariably at each other's throats. Consequently, many will anticipate the traumatic ending of the autobiographical strand. But while a sense of danger stalks the historical episodes (with its daringly revisionist take on the Lolita myth and predatory grooming), it's evident from Créton's merciless tirade against Mother Superior Farida Khelfa that Bluebeard has finally met his match.

Breillat's symbolism may not always be subtle, but Athina Rachel Tsangari's allusions to natural history programmes are often equally laboured in another rite of peculiar passage, Attenberg. Amongst other things, Tsangari has associate produced Dogtooth (2009) since making her directorial debut with The Slow Business of Going (2000) and the influence of Yorgos Lanthimos's bleak satire extends well beyond his cameo in this long overdue sophomore feature. Rigorously minimalist, but also disarmingly droll and increasingly poignant, this boldly unconventional drama offers further proof of the flourishing of Greek cinema over the last decade.

Despite being almost inseparable, best friends Ariane Labed and Evangelia Randou couldn't be more different. Randou works in a small-town bar and readily exploits her sexual allure, while Labed lives with disillusioned architect father Vangelis Mouriskis and is so naive and indifferent to men that she has to ask Randou to teach her to kiss. However, when she's asked to chauffeur visiting engineer Yorgos Lanthimos between his hotel and the factory where she's employed, Labed finds herself becoming intrigued and tentatively enters into an exploratory flirtation with the accommodating stranger. But Labed has more to worry about than losing her virginity, as Mourikis has been diagnosed with cancer and she spends long hours sitting with him in waiting rooms and private wards.

There's little more to report as far as plot is concerned, but this makes for consistently riveting viewing from the opening sequence in which Randou attempts to teach Labed to French kiss against a peeling whitewash wall before the pair drop on all fours and begin spitting at each other like cats. Equally enigmatic are the twosome's quirky dance routines that are periodically inserted into the narrative to reinforce the connection between the twentysomethings and the animal behaviour depicted in the David Attenborough documentaries that Labed adores.

Much of the focus falls on Labed, who won the Best Actress prize at the Venice Film Festival. She certainly proves a compelling presence, whether she's playing table football in Randou's bar, showing her friend her remarkably protruding shoulder blades or becoming increasingly confident with Lanthimos after he initially rejects her charmingly gauche effort to seduce him. Yet she's most affecting when confiding in Mouriskis that she imagines him to be entirely asexual and when listening to his instructions for his body to be transported to Hamburg after his death, as cremation was then illegal in Greece.

However, Labed's performance always feels directed and Tsangari's impact seems equally strong on Thimios Bakatakis's measured photography, Leandros Ntounis's evocative sound and Dafni Kalogianni's stylised production design. But this suggestion of external control only enhances the sense of the characters being subjects in an anthropological study designed to show that this is a society uneasy with such basic and essential human activities as procreation and death.

Finally, André Øvredal presents a very different slant on the natural world in Troll Hunter, another venture into found footage territory that amusingly exploits Norwegian folklore and shrewdly opts to reveal its monsters rather than hint at their existence, as in the case of The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Paranormal Activity (2007). Yet, while the special effects are crucial to the film's success, the judicious blend of wit and tension is even more significant, as it creates the impression that the gang from the Scooby-Doo Mystery Machine had strayed into Ruggero Deodato's classic video nasty, Cannibal Holocaust (1980).

Wannabe documentarist Glenn Erland Tosterud is keen to make a hard-hitting exposé of bear poaching in Norway's forests and persuades sound recordist Johanna Mørck and cameraman Tomas Alf Larsen to accompany him into the wilds to trap the notorious ex-naval commando Otto Jespersen in action. They conduct interviews with local hunters, who are suspicious about the tracks found at the site of an illegal kill, but their claims are dismissed by Hans Morten Hansen, the head of the Norwegian Wildlife Board. Undeterred, Tosterud heads west and finally succeeds in tracking Jespersen down. But rather than stalking bears, they find him fleeing a Tosserlad troll, which bites Larsen during their desperate retreat.

Having confessed he is a troll hunter alongside Hansen in the top secret Troll Security Service, Jespersen agrees to let the crew follow him on an inspection tour of bridges, on the proviso they don't believe in God, as trolls can scent Christian blood. He shows them the special ultraviolet ray gun than turns trolls into stone and demonstrates it on a three-headed creature they lure out of his lair. They also succeed in taking a blood sample from a Ringlefinch, so they can identify why the troll brethren has suddenly gone on the rampage after decades of comparative calm. But things start to turn nasty after they encounter a pack of Mountain King trolls and a giant Jotnar. Moreover, the ever-furtive Hansen is determined to prevent Tosterud from sharing his discoveries with the public.

Although Øvredal deserves great credit for conceiving this lively romp, first mention must go to SFX supervisor Oystein Larsen and sound designer Baard Haugan Ingebretsen for realising his vision and then to cinematographer Hallvard Bræin and editor Per-Erik Eriksen for socking the action over with such punch and panache. The performances similarly capture the bullish spirit, although tongues are often firmly in cheeks to give some of the more preposterous dialogue a knowing debunk.

As in Barry Sonnenfeld's Men in Black (1997), the adversaries aren't particularly scary. But Øvredal ably builds the suspense before their appearance, with the sequence in the abandoned mine that culminates in one of the student unit suffering grievously on account of their faith being particularly well judged. The final twist is also deftly done. So, while it may not be particularly profound and the humour is occasionally lavatorial, this is hugely original and entertaining and the inclusion of Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg's televised acknowledgement that trolls exist gives credence to the picture's sly suggestion of a governmental conspiracy.