The adaptation of Ramsey Campbell’s 1981 novel starts out most promisingly. Most striking is Jaume Balaguero’s visual style – a cool look not unreminiscent of Se7en (1995) and many of the subsequent films that borrowed their look from that – and its sense of burrowing into a visual darkness. It is as though all colour had been bled out of the frame and everything filmed in an all-pervading greyness that lights the faces of the characters with a bleakly haunted gauntness. This look is visually breathtaking and almost carries the film alone. However, the film has a major problem in that it is talky and little of the horror ever emerges from that which is spoken about to something we actually see. There are so many fascinating things brimming just beyond our grasp in the film – the child abduction, the sacrifice and corruption of an innocent, a Satanic cult that believe in ecstatic salvation through ultimate perversity, corrupted angels that refuse to take names (the nameless of the title).

However, there is little of this that emerges on the screen – there is one spookily haunting scene a few minutes in where the dead girl rings the mother telling her “They only wanted you to believe I was dead.” In the middle of the show, Carlos Lasarte gives an unnerving performance as the Hannibal Lecter-like cult leader being interviewed in a jail cell. However, take away all the abovementioned and there is almost nothing that would have to be changed in order to turn this into a routine police procedural about a detective and a mother searching for a missing girl. Jaume Balaguero generates such fine atmosphere that it is a shame that the film is not supported by any teeth. The ending arrived at is joltingly abrupt.