Chris Shaw wrote

An entry in the “Catalan” strand at the Film Festival, “The Body in the Woods” is a 1996 feature from the late Spanish filmmaker Joaquim Jorda, apparently known more for his documentary work than for fiction.

Introduced to the audience as a kind of Spanish “Twin Peaks”, this is a story of murder and corruption in the backwoods of Catalonia. The discovery of a woman’s body by a party of wild-boar hunters prompts an investigation by female police officer Lieutenant Cifuentes (Rossy de Palma) in the course of which the metaphorical shroud covering the corpse is drawn back for the director to show us a darker side of human nature, one of depravity, prejudice and thoughtless cruelty, as prevalent in this rural setting as in any other.

This is a Lynchian premise, but the execution is a long way from the gloss and glamour of “Twin Peaks”; don’t expect any bobby-socks here. Jorda’s approach reveals his documentary aesthetic, and the result is a flat, dispiriting, expose of human amorality, greed, exploitation and self-gratification. And be warned, no animals were *not* hurt in the making of this film, and it’s all up there on the screen, from the early squishing of hapless snails under the tyres of a four-by-four, through factory-farmed force-fed geese (which bizarrely seem to share their space with the owner’s wife’s kitchen and living room), to the predictable fate of the poor bloody boar in a final scene which both seems to condemn and glorify the act – draw your own line. Even the white pony gets its face slapped. The realist tradition gives the director a licence to shock but which at the same time appears strangely anachronistic: scenes like these are rarely depicted now in mainstream fiction cinema, presumable because legislation forbids it.

If you want Lynchian, watch something by the master himself; this film is sordid and squalid, but no doubt achieved what the director intended.