Li Yang’s intense psychological drama was one of the stand-outs at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Portraying the kidnapping of a young female student by a peasant family – who forces her to be their only son’s bride – this film grips with extraordinary ferocity, and delivers a trenchant commentary upon relations between rural Chinese and their urbanised neighbours.

Having gone to a remote part of northern China for temporary work, Bai Xuemei (Huang Lu) is drugged by human traffickers and wakes up to find that she’s been sold to a local family. Depicting with an appalled eye the details of Bai’s imprisonment, Blind Mountain is an adeptly controlled account of the young woman’s protracted escape attempt from the community.

Directed with lean, documentary-style restraint, the film gathers an achingly oppressive sense of tension as it charts Bai’s increasingly desperate efforts to escape. As suggested by the title, one of the most unsettling aspects of the film is the surrounding community’s impassive refusal to acknowledge Bai’s plight. With echoes of Deliverance, the film’s portrait of this village, whose members are all implicit in Bai’s entrapment, proves even more claustrophobic in its sense of all-pervasive menace than the enclosed underground setting of the director’s previous film, Blind Shaft.

Savage in its irony, unrelenting in its tension, and with a final reel of bleak catharsis, Blind Mountain is an edge-of-your-seat thriller of rare distinction. ma

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