PLEASE NOTE THIS FILM TAKES PLACE AT THE STEAM MILL

There are six chapters in the cracking, below-the-radar Spanish crime drama The Night of the Sunflowers. Each is told from a different perspective, and each veers unpredictably into the next, creating a gripping and blood-soaked daisy chain of cause and effect.

The technique of the writer-director, Jorge Sánchez-Cabezudo, may remind you of the globetrotting Oscar-winner Babel, but in confining his story entirely to a parched village in rural Spain, he keeps far tighter control over its ramifications. There's no absurd connection to yak-farmers in the Tibetan steppes here, or whatever. It's a local affair, albeit an extremely messy one.

The first segment concerns a travelling salesman (Manuel Morón), who is passing through town. When he finds a beautiful young woman, Gabi (Judith Diakhate), alone in the woods, he tries to rape her, but is interrupted by the return of her speleologist husband Esteban (Carmelo Gómez) and photographer Pedro (Mariano Alameda), who have been investigating a newly discovered cave.

The would-be rapist escapes unseen, and the second chapter, told from the point of view of Esteban and Pedro, then starts, backtracking to earlier that day. By the end of it, they have found Gabi in a state of shock, and on their drive back to the village the appearance of a man walking on the road sends her into paroxysms of fear.

They stop the car to accost him, but he runs. In the third chapter, an incredibly violent showdown follows, by which time we know two things the justice-seekers don't: the man Gabi has identified isn't a very pleasant chap. But he isn't her attacker either.

This is virtuoso storytelling, laced with the insidious omens and reversals of a top-flight Greek tragedy. The arrival of an unreliable local police deputy (Vicente Romero) and the suspicions of his superior (Celso Bugallo) send the story barrelling off in a whole new direction, but Sánchez-Cabezudo seamlessly shepherds your attention towards their wary relationship with just a few deft strokes.

Remarkably, this is his debut. It deserves as big an audience as it can find.