Most Beautiful Island is a chilling portrait of an undocumented young woman's struggle for survival as she finds redemption from a tortured past in a dangerous game.
At a lean eighty minutes, Most Beautiful Island has little extraneous material in it, and Asensio spins a suspenseful web that delivers a truly shocking - and strangely satisfying - revelation.
An intense and sometimes claustrophobic allegory about the pitfalls of the immigrant experience under the generic disguise of a psychological thriller.
A short, stressful, and utterly spellbinding debut that transforms the immigrant experience into the stuff of an early Polanski psychodrama, Ana Asensio's Most Beautiful Island is a worthy winner of the SXSW Grand Jury Prize for best narrative feature.
The pivotal scenes may be fictionalised, but the prickling, precarious threat is clammily authentic and inspired by the experiences of the film's writer, director and star ...
Many genre movies in which bad things happen to women end with them fighting back, but here, as people surely would in real life, they just take the money and run.
