Secuestro Express (18)

If you really must scare yourself this week, try Jonathan Jakubowicz's harrowing kidnap drama for size. It recounts the quite nightmarish ordeal of a young couple, Carla (Mia Maestro) and Martin (Jean Paul Leroux), who emerge from a Caracas nightclub straight into the itchy hands of three gun-toting thugs, the kidnapping of the affluent middle-classes being at epidemic levels in the Venezuelan capital. Most abduction dramas vary the pace as the victim acclimates to the surroundings; this one just goes at headlong, terrifying speed through 24 hours of vicious criminality. Here is a place so dangerous that you can be held up even while someone else is kidnapping you. No use looking to the police for help; they're scumbags and rapists too. Jakubowicz, who had a struggle on his hands getting this feature debut made, films in a city as divided as Victorian London between privilege and privation, and the stink of class war rising from its ghetto housing is almost palpable. Venezuela for a holiday? You'd have to be Caracas.