SOUTHERN COMFORT

What was supposed to be a normal exercise in the swamps of Louisiana turns into a nightmare for a platoon of the National Guard (the so-called "Sunday guerrillas"), when, following a poorly received joke, they find themselves hunted by some Cajuns (a Francophone minority) who, knowing the area like the back of their hand, sadistically enjoy a deadly manhunt. What might seem at first glance (especially because of the title) to be an action movie, is in reality a thriller in the style of "A Quiet Weekend of Fear", supported by a masterful sense of tension. The vast swamp where the film begins becomes a claustrophobic nightmare scenario in which the protagonists move, who are anything but heroes, and upon whom paranoia does not take long to set in. The killers, then, are like ghosts that we see in the face only for a few fleeting seconds at a time. The film is not without very violent scenes, such as the one where a soldier's skull is blown off with a shotgun blast (the weapon used by the killers, much more realistic than any knife or machete), or even cruel, such as the sequence of the hanged rabbits. The sense of danger is also felt when, towards the end, the last two soldiers arrive at a village inhabited by other Cajuns, where, while the music plays, a pig is seen being skinned, a dark omen about the future of the protagonists…