Danica De La Rey Jones’s elite fighter is targeted in a film that would be more exciting if its padded runtime was trimmed down

Here is an action-thriller that opens with some zesty Call of Duty-style military violence unfolding in Angola in 2013. A crack unit believe themselves to be in pursuit of poachers who kill protected animals for profit, but these baddies turn out to be all that and more: they kidnap children, burying them underground in coffins with a wifi connection so that they can broadcast live footage of the kids to their parents when they demand ransom money. In short, they’re not very nice people. Elite fighter Jessica (Danica De La Rey Jones) handily wrecks their operation and now, more than a decade later, they’re after revenge.

The revenge takes the form of hunting this resourceful single mother, whom they have finally located despite a change of identity, through the bushland of South Africa, with a motley crew of villains all loosely connected to the enterprise she took down back in the day. Their leader is a relentless sadist called Lazar, who is written as a fairly one-note character – and that note is simply, “he’s evil” – but full credit to actor Richard Lukunku for finding a way to smash that one note over and over again in a manner that’s actually pretty effective in a blunt-force trauma kind of way.

This thriller begins with a grisly jolt of invention before succumbing to diminishing returns

As Carlos Goitia’s low-budget horror movie opens, we begin in medias res as a woman (Paula Brasca) wakes up in a standard murder basement: muted decor, very little natural light, a sturdy workbench with an impressive array of rusty tools, various masks made of skin. She immediately realises she is lying in a pile of corpses – all mutilated women. She herself is badly injured. Not a happy awakening for the character, but it’s not a bad jumping-off point for a horror movie.

In short order, the killer (Damian Castillo) heaves into view. Naturally, he’s an absolutely massive man in a Texas Chain Saw Massacre-type get-up – and our heroine very sensibly plays dead. This is a creepy and interesting conceit – how long is she going to be able to keep up the pretence? What happens once he rumbles the ruse? Unfortunately, Goitia can’t quite assemble enough material to keep the “what if you had to pretend to be dead?” idea in play for a whole feature film, and proceedings start to feel thin and stretched at a point where there is still plenty of movie left to play out.