JofiElias

I went into this series with all the skepticism I could muster, fully prepared to tear it apart and condemn its creators for what I assumed would be a crass exploitation of a murdered child's memory.

I expected a mediocre director reenacting the crime like a puppet show, tossing in a few dramatic moments, a dash of moralizing, and calling it art.

But by the end of the first episode, to my surprise, I found myself utterly captivated. The storytelling was elegant, deliberate, and profoundly moving.

The characters didn't feel like they were following a script; they felt alive, fully realized. The cast was extraordinary, and the direction brought out their very best.

Even with its grounding in the everyday, the story resonates with the weight of universal tragedy.

It's clear that Mezzapesa isn't just a director-he's an artist. He's given his characters something rare: a soul.

This film is layered.

The first layer is the individual drama: a mother struggles to manage a child with a potentially lethal deformity, both for himself and for others.

The second layer is the social conflict: the child belongs to a noble and wealthy lineage, which has codes that the mother does not understand and initially rejects (hunting, the separation of rights and duties between men and women, religiosity).

But pushing the metaphor even further, Molitor reveals the third layer, which is political: lycanthropy as an expression of the impulse driving right-wing politics: the theory of "homo homini lupus"; Darwinian selection; the Church not as an expression of Christ's message, but as a façade of "respectability" for a closed and conservative community; and finally, capitalism as an expression of "feeding on one's own kind."

Without this third level of interpretation, the seemingly insignificant scene of hunting migrants would lose all its expressive power.

The film is extremely ambitious. Here, horror serves a content that transcends its boundaries. It is a true artistic endeavour, which does not forgo maintaining the narrative integrity of the three layers, making the first level of engagement enjoyable as well.

One of the most intriguing horrors of recent years.