Negret brings personal experience to the material; his own family endured two ordeals by kidnapping, and he works up a painfull convincing sense of sweaty desperation.

Admirably tough-minded if overstuffed, Towards Darkness delivers on its foreboding title.

A convoluted bilingual thriller about a kidnapping in Colombia, Towards Darkness may be too clever for its own good. Frosh director Antonio Negret intertwines so many disparate characters, each with a flashback-studded backstory, that after a while the exhausted viewer, assaulted by sudden time-jumps, agitated handheld camerawork and tediously protracted suspense, ceases to care.

The Colombian tourist board won't be too happy about Antonio Negret's intermittently compelling thriller, which presents his native country as a cesspool of corruption and violence.