Spanish film-maker Alejandro Amenábar has long enjoyed a fruitful relationship with fantastic subjects (Abre los ojos/Open Your Eyes (1997), The Others (2001), Regression (2015)) and made his start in features, after the short thrillers Himenóptero (1992) and Luna (1995), with this horror thriller, completed while he was still studying at Complutense University in Madrid. An unusually confident debut, it bagged seven of the main awards at the 1996 Goyas, getting Amenábar’s career off to the best possible start.

It takes for it’s the e that most pervasive of film-related urban legends, the “snuff” movie, the film or video secretly made by twisted psychopaths to sell on the black market, promising jaded punters the chance to see real death on the screen. The myth of the “snuff movie” dates back to Ed Sanders’ 1971 book The Family: The Story of Charles Manson’s Dune Buggy Attack Battalion, in which he made the claim that Manson and his followers had recorded evidence of their killings, though no film or tape ever surfaced. Indeed, despite several claims for the films to exist, none have ever been found, though there are recordings said to have been made by serial killers like Charles Ng and Leonard Lake, though those recordings were made for the ghoulish gratification of the killers and were never meant for public consumption, even by the most clandestine of means.

Amenábar’s film, which he also scripted and scored, tends towards the latter so it doesn’t really involve “snuff movies” at all. The tape uncovered by student Ángela (Ana Torrent, who had made her debut as the lead child in Víctor Erice’s acclaimed El espíritu de la colmena/The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)) was made solely for the gratification of its creator and was never meant to be found, let alone marketed. Ángela is working on her thesis (the Tesis of the title) on audiovisual violence its effects on and the family and visits her supervisor, Professor Figueroa (Miguel Picazo), asking him to scour the university archives for the most violent films they hold. Fellow student Chema (Fele Martínez), who collects violent and pornographic videos, is also roped in to help but when Figueroa discovers an unlabelled tape hidden in the archives it leads to his mysterious death in a screening room. Retrieving the tape, Ángela is horrified to find that it’s a “snuff” tape. Chema is fascinated by the recording and recognises the victim as Vanessa (Olga Margallo), another student who went missing two years ago, and he’s able to determine the exact model of video camera that the tape was recorded on. Ángela spots the same camera being used by a young man named Bosco (Eduardo Noriega) and starts trying to piece together the evidence – Chema believes that Bosco is the killer, she has her doubts and what role in all of this is played by Professor Jorge Castro (Xabier Elorriaga), Ángela’s new supervisor?

The film suggests that people are largely hypocritical about their relationship to screen violence, frequently decrying it while at the same time fascinated by it. When Ángela first watches the film, despite the subject of her thesis, she first “watches” it with the television’s contrast turned down, unable to watch the actual torture and murder of the victim, instead listening horrified to her agonised screams. She only watches it later, literally through her fingers at times, after Chema has described some of its content to her, cautioning her not to turn around and face the screen, but she does so anyway. She can’t help herself. And nor, the film suggests, can we. We may be appalled by the prospect of violence, but chances are, we’re not going to look away from it.

Some have suggested that the film is as much about the state of Spanish filmmaking in the 1990s as it was about violence and our simultaneous attraction to it and repulsion by it, though as few will be aware of the conditions that Amenábar is supposedly satirising, it’s the notion of screen violence that wins through in the end. Ángela, marvellously played by Torrent (in fact all the performances are first rate), emerges as a complex character, her relationship with the subject of her work shifting constantly throughout the film, even becoming blinded to the identity of the killer (which the film does little to actually hide) by her attraction to him.

Amenábar throws in several knowing winks and tips of the hat to earlier films that looked at the link between violence, voyeurism and cinema, notably the films of Brian De Palma to who Tesis is virtually a love letter. There are the to-be-expected moments of Hitchcockian suspense, but it’s his disciple De Palma that you’ll be most reminded of, be it in the lengthy, wordless chase through the corridors of the university, Ángela pursued by Bosco, about who we know nothing at this point, or the Blow Out (1981) inspired scenes of Ángela and Chema trying to piece together clues as to the killer from audiovisual material at hand. By extension, that also puts Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) in the mix too. Amenábar knows his film history and isn’t afraid to let us know what he likes.

Not everything here works. One has to question why the killer didn’t take the tape with him after killing Figueroa lapse in logic that requires a deal of good will from the audience to get over; at 125 minutes, it’s too much of a good thing, Amenábar struggling to sustain the suspense across the whole film; and some may bemoan the fact that the killer is too easy to guess and that the red herring is just too obvious though this might be missing the point that Amenábar is trying to make. Tesis is not as polished as some of the later films that made Amenábar’s name, but it doesn’t really need to be. The occasional jagged edge just adds to it (and are somehow appropriate given the subject matter) and for the most part it’s a surprisingly slickly made film for what was, essentially, a student project and a cracking start to a career that would turn out to be as prolific as perhaps we’d like.