Review by Beatrice On 13-Jul-2024
Existence, by its very nature and essence, is an imperfection, an irregularity, a monstrosity.
I cured them of this absurd disease of living.
A man writes a letter of apology to his colleagues and his daughter: he attempts suicide but fails.
A call comes in: a family exterminated.
Enzo Vitello is a policeman, he sticks his fingers down his throat to vomit up all the pills he took and heads to the scene.
The presence of the letter at the crime scene confirms that the killer is always the same, named Dostoevsky precisely because of the thoughts he leaves written on graph paper in block letters: like a completed crossword puzzle.
Everything happens in non-places, desolate, dark, and miserable.
Including the barracks where the police gather and where a new challenging and determined colleague has just arrived.
Seven years have passed and the investigations yield no results: no motive, no connection between the victims.
Vitello's house is by a river: he is a lonely man, obsessed with the letters from the killer, pinned to the wall of a room.
Not only what annoys you, but also what you admire in others is a reflection of your inner self.
The Weltanschauung of the murderer, accompanied by the description of the victims' last moments, influences the paranoias and disturbances of the policeman, father of a girl who hates him.
Ambra is a squatter, a drug addict, and shares her home with two other peers.
She has not seen her father, who abandoned her as a child.
The girls call him because Ambra does not return from the gypsies' house and the father intervenes, they will meet again: both take substances and Enzo, just to see her again, offers her a supply.
Bagged food, cans, stops in the car, countryside, animals, chicken coops where to leave notes, desolate houses, architectural skeletons, caravans, misery: despair and the abyss.
Dostoevsky points out that the average life span is 82 years of shit, of which he calculates the months, weeks, days, and hours of pain, of pretense, of smiles that are grimaces of regret, torture, darkness, obscenities.
Children should be told immediately: we were wrong to make you, we were just looking for someone who could take the horror in our place.
The police strategy involves investigations in the towns where the murders take place, but it is necessary to follow the trail of the letters; the killer wants to communicate, to talk to someone, and it is important that he continues to do so until he opens up enough, until he makes a mistake.
However, no strategy seems plausible to recover the relationship with his daughter, who still remembers when on her sixth birthday, her father never arrived and although it was unrealistic that he would come, Ambra had bought him an original Fanta with all her savings.
Another murder, a corpse falls onto a car from above, Vitello finds the letter but to prevent his young colleague from finding it, he swallows it, ingests it, and thus begins a new journey, individual and personal.
He hands in his badge and starts a new path: an investigation in a former orphanage because chaos slips into that place where I will never return... the city of wrong, lost children, the CONTAINER (Dostoevsky, not Fyodor)
Between the Psycho episode, at the house of an orphan now grown up, the hilarious scene of Enzo's boss in a bar in the open countryside, and the unmissable scene of the receptionist at a motel/dive, a video sent to all police colleagues shows Vitello's daughter in a gangbang with black men in the style of Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac: a fierce punishment for the unforgivable father.
That father who sells the house by the river to two young people expecting a child at a bargain price as a gift to his daughter: one last meeting, a disease, a confession, an explanation of the abandonment, a reaction, a devastating, relentless, unforgettable scene.
After all, the only way to guarantee a better future is to give them a horrifying present...
Meetings with the cook, with Carannante, the discovery of Ambrosoli and the suspicion that builds, structures, solidifies.
A barking dog, a murky western finale, a letter, a will: death should not be sought, it is something that surrounds every one of our actions, thoughts, deeds.
Enzo Vitello was his name, he wanted me or he wanted death: he found both and I believe it was a double disappointment.
A river, the light, nature. THE END
Enzo Vitello is obsessive, structured enough to bear the weight of the world but not of himself: he is a man in great difficulty who resists and gives up in turns.
Everything is essential, artisanal, sparse, even the weather: it never rains, the sun never shines. Everything is rarefied, gray, anonymous, indefinable, unrecognizable, untraceable.
The world is a CONTAINER, a noumenon that traps the phenomenon, a will that devours the representation.
The joke about sexism that does not see the possibility that the killer is a woman: that woman who is always the place of devastation, manipulation, alienation, oppression, distrust, laceration, abuse.
A non-place for a non-character.
The ontology of human misery.
A puzzle of metaphysical locations.
The comfort zone has no space.
The unrepresentable is represented.
A shroud envelops existence without a horizon.
The place of the a priori compresses and censors catharsis.
Trying to stay in the world is a nightmare that rewinds the film in a loop.
Fragments of an indecent discourse: life, existence, meaning.
The city of wrong children or the obsession with being children and being wrong, alive and bleeding, mortally wounded. Ghosts make us suffer but they must be revealed.
The Platonic cave of Fabio and Damiano identifies the non-place in the visceral non-space, where the probe insinuates itself to investigate the offal, the brain, the heart, the sweetbreads, the liver... within which the intestinal labyrinth of our immoral or amoral experiences is etched. A spiral CT scan, a nuclear magnetic resonance retraces the innards of a fragmented, worn and torn, stretched and worn-out identity that sees its possibility only in the annulment of itself.
Some small imperfections do not affect the complexity of the absolutely overwhelming work of the D'Innocenzo brothers because the inner spaces are mute and often clogged with discordant banalities.
Vitello's material suicide could not be accomplished, only that of the beyond body was to be done and the true liberation lies in the death of identity and not in the matter that is never sufficient to guarantee it.
Everything is pastoral, no glamour, no neon, no seduction, everything is repelling, hostile, a swampy area, a dead zone.
The place of interiority has no aesthetics, the entrails, the colonoscopic probe is the metaphor of the place being explored.
Life sodomizes you.
The only plausible therapeutic obstinacy is euthanasia, the liberation from the body.
Everything is opaque, dark, ....
Only the last shot sees the sun, the green, and a watercourse: the Platonic cave of the brothers is ethical rather than epistemological, existential rather than cultural. The darkness of senselessness envelops each person's life, relegating and condemning it to programmed failure: the only flash of light is in death which exhales and exhausts the labored breath of life.
The worst pain a man can suffer: having understanding of many things and control over none.
13-Jul-2024 by Beatrice
