With its dread filled score, tension thick atmosphere and excellent performances, Sicario is a heart pounding and haunting thriller that uses the War on Drugs as a catalyst to venture into the dark recesses of the soul.

When it comes to crime on the big screen, certain illegal organisations have become glossed up caricatures. The mafia for instance are damn near parodies of mugging faces and “fuhgeddaboudit” dialogue, the result of one Martin Scorsese knock off after another. Ditto the Japanese Yakuza, thanks to many a John Woo film.

The Mexican drug Cartels are far from such dilution. Much too scary, much too sadistic and much too relevant, their reign of terror – with a confirmed 60,000 dead at their hands – is more horror story than criminal enterprise, a plague that has suffocated one nation and is now poised to do the same in another.

That is where Sicario begins, as a an anonymous home in a sleepy Arizona town is raided by an FBI team who find a house of horrors where beheaded bodies stuffed the walls and booby traps are set to kill, a gift from the Cartels  to those in law enforcement who wish to stop them.

On the front lines of this War on Drugs is FBI agent Kate Mercer (Emily Blunt), idealistic and dedicated to the point where a personal life is non-existent. Hell, even buying a bra is a luxury that cannot be afforded.

When Kate is asked to join a secret government task force assigned to take down the biggest and baddest drug lord south of the border -led by clandestine flip-flop wearing operative Matt (Josh Brolin) and all of his smiling, need-to-know bluster - Kate eagerly accepts yet soon finds herself in deep, dark, murky territory where the line between legal and illegal is painted with blood.

Blunt delivers a strong performance that follows in the footsteps of powerhouse frontline female characters seen in Zero Dark Thirty and The Silence of the Lambs, effectively portraying the sturdy courage of a character who stands her ground against unseen forces on both sides of the law, increasingly becoming an island onto her own as things escalate.

And escalate they do with skilful poise from director Denis Villeuve, who along with his work on Prisoners and true life Montreal Massacre thriller Polytechnique should be crowned the king of dread, as Villeuve successfully exploits  the monstrous evil which is the Cartels as a beast that threatens to unleash at any moment.

Yet as the film’s title suggests (“Sicario” is Spanish for “hitman”) there is another beast at play here. Enter Benicio Del Toro as Alejandro, a “Mexican prosecutor” whose motives while mysterious are backed by a brutal arsenal of violence. Del Toro has played scarily dangerous figures before (Savages, The Pledge) yet not with the kind of controlled rage and ambiguous morality that Alejandro demands to be played with. Del Toro successfully accomplishes the feat delivering some of his best work in the process.

Along with the foreboding almost growling score from Jonann Johannsson, white knuckle tight editing from Joe Walker, and rich photography from Roger Deakins, Sicario is a film that will unnerve you and then stick with you after the credits roll, a crime thriller of immensely dark proportions akin to a nightmare but one whose monsters are very, very real.