Strange arthouse film labelled as a horror to lure House with the Laughing Windows fans like me into a false sense of security. There is the odd creepy moment in this one, but what the film is all about is something else entirely. Someone ask Pupi Avati because I don't have a clue, although I did get a huge Federico Fellini vibe from it all.
Further muddying the waters is my basic command of Italian and the visual quality of the version I watched being akin to that of an eighteenth generation VHS of a porn film and you get the idea that the odds were not in the film's favour. With that, let's move on to what it may or may not have been about.
A group of actors and one writer are currently working on their newest play, which seems to be about one of the actresses involved and her child Thomas. Meanwhile a man wanders about a cemetary talking about the same thing, before suggesting to the actors that they hold a séance. After speaking in a child's voice, a child called Thomas does appear to the actors, who then take him to their next destination.
Among them they agree to let Thomas himself decide whom he spends the rest of his life with, as the actors confront their own anxieties, and an old (sometimes young!) man kind of stalks them throughout the film. That's about all I can tell you about the plot, which may or may not have happened at all, seeing that the ending doesn't make any sense either.
There's an avalanche of surreal visual material throughout the film, as the script writer digs up stone bust in front of a ruined castle and babbles about the voices in his head. An old lady is led through a hotel where old crones, labelled either alive or dead, lie in beds around them. Someone orders an ice cream and the waiter runs up hundreds of stairs to serve it. Actors walk seamlessly from a stage to the middle of a wood. You can see why even with an HD copy and full subtitles, things wouldn't be any easier to figure out.
This isn't my kind of thing at all to be honest.
Mariangela Melato has the biggest eyes I've ever seen on a person.
