A tense, terse two-hander, Tiger Raid is a film of a different stripe, intermittently meditative, visceral, crude, poetic, consistently bleak and beautiful, like a Romantic heath. It prowls without relent to a conclusion that is provocative, satisfying.
At times some of its history bleeds through; there is at times a staginess in blocking and costume that recalls the footlight-flavoured fascism of McKellen's Richard III, but in other places there are things that only film can do - the gods take the horizon, no arch obscures the stars, and in one moment of closed circuit television it is really only the camera that can contribute the right kind of concealment. Dean Valentine's compositions add to the textures of sand and grime and desperation that so inflect the film. Dense, literary, open to interpretation, its two protagonists orbiting each other and themselves in a symmetry less fearful than fractal, this is brilliant stuff, bright-burning talent to see.