The film

An elite police squad is tasked with taking out a drug lord who has barricaded himself in a social housing building considered impregnable. Things go wrong very quickly: the crime boss promises a reward to any tenant who manages to kill a cop, by any means necessary. Floor after floor, the surviving cops must fend for their lives and find a way out of the labyrinthine tenement.

If we could only keep one action movie from the last decade, it would be THE RAID. With its stripped-down narrative, Gareth Evans’ film frees itself from all expectations and focuses solely on high-octane, visceral, and extreme action scenes where the characters’ evolution depends entirely on how well they can punch and avoid that machete-wielding brute coming from behind them. An explosion of action spectacle dedicated to Indonesian martial art pencak silat, with incredible choreographies that resurrect the best elements of Asian cinema. Already cult!

The director

Welshman Gareth Huw Evans, born in 1980, pays for his master’s degree in filmmaking at the University of South Wales by teaching Welsh online. He is hired to direct a documentary on pencak silat. This first exposure to Indonesian martial arts leads first to the hard-hitting MERANTAU (2009), and then to THE RAID (2011) and THE RAID : BERANDAL (2014), always with lead actor Iko Uwais. These films have made Evans one of the biggest names in today’s action film industry.

Selected filmography

2006 – FOOTSTEPS
2009 – MERANTAU
2013 – V/H/S 2 ('Safe Haven' segment)
2014 – THE RAID: BERANDAL
2018 – THE APOSTLE
2020 – GANGS OF LONDON (TV)