貞子3D / Sadako 3D, directed by Tsutomu Hanabusa, co-written with Yoshinobu Fujioka, based on Kōji Suzuki’s novel S, Japan, 2012 - ⭐⭐

Also known as, the film with the cursed 404 error page.

It seems that after finishing my Saw rewatch last week, I’ve found another series of bad films to punish myself with.

The last couple of weeks pushed me irrevocably down the path of Sadako completionism, even though the stories get farther and farther away from what made Ringu interesting.
Anyway, it’s the fault of Kōji Suzuki, who kept going back to the - ahem - well for his books, and the film studios that followed through after each novel or short story collection.

This movie starts in the worst possible way, with a very digital-looking scene and unimpressive CGI, which also reminds you that there is a reason why “3D” is in the title. The kind of thing that makes you stop and think: ‘Do I really want to watch this?’.
Have we learnt nothing from Saw 3D and The Final Destination?
Luckily, it goes quickly back to more traditional filmmaking.

Faithful to her intentions from Rasen/Spiral, Sadako has found a new way to go viral: a new cursed video to spread on (the equivalent of) YouTube. Word of mouth is enough to make phone-addicted people curious to web-search for ’the video that kills you’, only to run into a 404 page.
Disappointment ensues, but when they are alone, the dead page activates and shows the fatal clip, causing the viewer to immediately end their life.
Gone are the days of VHS, and the patience of waiting seven days for an appointment with death. Not with today’s attention span.

This time, our heroine is Akane Ayukawa (in line with the usual naming convention), teacher of one of the victims and blessed with the power of a glass-shattering scream. Since her boyfriend is affectionate but not very adventurous, she pairs up with the lead detective on the case.
Then you know the drill: bad things happen and in the third act we get to the well. But what lurks there is not what we expect. Look how they massacred my girl.

It’s all quite nonsensical, in service of the 3D gimmick, and the screenplay seems to deviate considerably from the novel.
I can’t really find any positive point about this film, but I somehow felt sorry considering a lower rating.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day, directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, written by Erik Sommers and Chris McKenna, US, 2026 - ⭐⭐⭐⭐

If last week’s visit to the cinema counted less than 12 people in the screening for Hokum, this was a very different experience: the biggest screen of the same multiplex was packed with very enthusiastic twenty-something-year-old young adults, ready to cheer and occasionally sigh in unison, fully invested in the feelings of the twenty-something-year-old young adults on the screen.

Yours truly, who has been twenty-something-year-old twice, was equally engaged with the heartbreak of Peter Parker having to watch his former friends from a distance. I don’t know what it is about these characters that makes them so sympathetic even for my old cold heart; sure, they are really good-looking actors, and have amazing chemistry and a real life partnership. But there must be very good screenwriting craft to make us so affectionate towards them.
Or maybe it’s just me having a soft spot for this incarnation of Spider-Man: together with Doctor Strange, he’s the character that brought me back to the MCU after the flat and repetitive Phase 2.
But enough about me.

With the same screenwriting duo as the Jon Watts trilogy, but a new director, this may be my favourite of the four MCU Spider-Man films (full disclosure: as much as I appreciate the idea, I’ve never bought the gimmicky nature of No Way Home).

So much so that I even considered a higher rating, despite the quantity and size of the film’s flaws: when I looked at my watch after an hour or so, I was glad that there was still so much of the movie to go, but I wondered how much story would be crammed into it. The Hulk sections specifically are integral to the plot, but feel like padding - much more than the fun unannounced appearance of another character (remember the time when, director Cretton was forced to add to Shang-Chi a completely extraneous fighting scene between Wong and The Abomination, for reasons that I still fail to understand?).
Frank Castle striking a friendship with Peter Parker is also a bit perplexing, but Tom Holland and Jon Bernthal are longtime friends themselves, so, ok, why not bring in the whole clan.
And the plot… highly predictable (except for one very predictable moment that I was so stupidly emotionally invested in that I didn’t see coming), with a conflict resolution that’s very similar to another recent Marvel movie.

So… why four stars?
Two main reasons: first, we haven’t had Spider-Man swinging through New York for a while, and this film takes a lot of care in giving a sense of the place (although it was mostly shot around London), and returning to a comic book feeling that was previously lost. It brought me back to seeing Raimi’s Spider-Man and the enthusiastic approval of a dear, Spidey-fanatic friend.
Second, whenever Holland, Zendaya and Jacob Batalon are together on screen, it’s like being with friends. It’s a kind of magic, and the film closes on a final scene that is just perfect in its simplicity.
Or maybe I just have a soft spot for Destin Daniel Cretton (more on that later).

Vie privée / A Private Life, directed by Rebecca Zlotowski, co-written with Anne Berest and Gaëlle Macé, France, 2025 - ⭐⭐⭐

Jodie Foster in a French-speaking role, except when she swears, in English. So relatable, and I’m not surprised at all that one of my favourite actresses is so good at languages.

She plays Lilian, an American psychiatrist in Paris, amused by the fact that one of her patients is abandoning treatment after seeing a hypnotist, but then very shaken when another person she’s been treating for years (Virginie Efira) dies suddenly, apparently having taken her own life. While the woman’s husband (Mathieu Amalric) blames her for not preventing the suicide, Lilian has a different opinion on the cause of death, and enlists her former partner (Daniel Auteuil) to help her investigate.

What starts as an intriguing, Hitchcockian mystery, turned for me into a dissatisfying exploration of the protagonist’s own attitude, leading to a series of events and actions that undermine her whole status as a lead we can root for.
The solution of the whodunnit may be ingenious, or at least thematically coherent, but by then I had lost most interest.

Frederick Wiseman has a cameo as Lilian’s old mentor.

Short Term 12, written and directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, US, 2013 - ⭐⭐⭐⭐½ (up from ⭐⭐⭐⭐)

I first ‘met’ Cretton at a screening at the Cinematek in 2014, followed by a Q&A with the director. I’m not sure why I joined this event: I probably heard about Short Term 12 through Filmspotting.

I absolutely loved the film, which introduced me to a promising young actress called Brie Larson (whom I had actually encountered before, without noticing her, in Scott Pilgrim). Twelve years later, aside from the general feeling and a scene on a bike, I didn’t remember much about the actual story.

Despite buying the Blu-Ray several years ago (in a German edition, which means no English or French editions were available - giving an idea of how popular this film is), I had not mustered the courage to rewatch it, fearing it would somehow disappoint me.
Brand New Day convinced me this was the right moment.

Twelve years ago, the only actor I knew in the cast was Magnolia’s Melora Walters.
This time, after top-billed future Oscar winner and Captain Marvel, the names appearing told a different story: John Gallagher Jr… Rami Malek… Stephanie Beatriz… Kaitlyn Dever… LaKeith Stanfield (credited as ‘Keith Stanfield’).
Granted, some or even most of them, or at least their faces, were probably already known to American audiences (Stanfield was the only one debuting with this film, and the only actor reprising his role from Cretton’s short film of the same name). But not to me.
And it’s difficult to find any fault in their acting. Even Malek (wait, he’s in The Master?!) delivers a perfectly natural performance as newbie Nate.

That is the strong point of Short Term 12: as we slowly discover what’s motivating Grace (Larson) in leading the team of young adults helping at this foster care facility, everything looks so natural that, even if most of the plot is quite predictable - with some rather unbelievable swings -, it doesn’t matter.
It’s touching, it’s funny, it’s rewarding.
I hope Cretton doesn’t get stuck in the Marvel machine for the rest of his career.

リング0 バースデイ / Ring 0: Birthday, directed by Norio Tsuruta, written by Hiroshi Takahashi, based on Kōji Suzuki’s short story Lemon Heart, Japan, 2000 - ⭐⭐⭐

Last week’s Sadako made me curious about the Ringu sequels I haven’t seen yet, plus there is a French boxset coming out that’s a bit less expensive than its Arrow counterpart, and I wanted to check whether - completionism aside - it would feel like a waste of money.

As the numeral indicates, this is not really a sequel - rather, a prequel to the cursed video era, which means that we shouldn’t really worry about whether it fits in the Ring 2-Nakata or in the Raisen-Suzuki continuity.
Sadako is alive and well, or at least as well as a young woman with her troubled family story can be. Very shy, she tries to fit into society by joining a theatre group. There, her shyness attracts the reciprocated attentions of the young sound technician, and the unwelcome proximity of the older director.
But the other members of the troupe start dreaming about a well, the lead actress dies, jealousies and rivalries ensue; everything would be already complicated for Sadako even without the inevitable duo of journalists who are investigating her past (the reporter is Kumiko Asō, who’ll star in Pulse a year later).

We know of course what Sadako’s fate will be, but the way it happens is a third act of weird character decisions and an unexpected backstory, finally giving a bit of horror substance to what is otherwise mostly a drama.
Not fully satisfying, but not a bad film either.

Saw X, directed by Kevin Greutert, written by Josh Stolberg and Pete Goldfinger, US, 2023 - ⭐½ (down from ⭐⭐)

Everyone complained about the lack of Tobin Bell in Spiral, so here’s the course-correction, giving John Kramer the most screen time ever in a Saw film.
Jigsaw looks old and frail (but quite in good shape, considering the lead actor was 81), although this is a midquel happening somewhere between Saw and Saw III.

You might have missed this detail - after all it was mentioned only in every single sequel - but John Kramer was diagnosed with brain cancer.
It took me watching ten films twice to realise that the brain tumour is the real protagonist of this saga: it’s the reason Jigsaw has nothing to lose, it’s the pretext to find people to ‘play games with’, but I get it now, it’s the tumour that has transformed a kind engineer into a bloodthirsty serial killer ready to off you because you haven’t quit smoking.
Anyway.

He really doesn’t want to die, so he finds a dodgy Norwegian experimental cure, he goes to Mexico City to try it, he pays a lot of money, he undergoes surgery, then he realises he’s been scammed, and this time it really is personal. Even more than the time someone sold a motorbike with faulty brakes to his nephew.

The good: it’s pleasant to spend some time with Tobin Bell, and for maybe an hour, the film is just a drama, and we are sorry for him (except for a gory ‘daydreaming’ sequence, clearly added so that people could have something to be horrified about early on). We also get original and favourite disciple Amanda back, given the chance to show a different side of her character. And, the last scene is a nice reversal of the usual way Saw films end. Too bad that this is the closing scene for the movies, not the end of the chronological story.

The bad: first and foremost, Shawnee Smith’s wig/haircut is just horrible and distracting. This being a prequel, we miss the usual non-linear three-parted Saw sequel structure of prequel plot/trap plot/story plot + twist: the story part is all at the beginning, the trap plot is the second half. The twist - quite a generous word in this case - is weak weak weak.

The ugly: no character featured in a Saw film has ever been a nice person. And it’s true that for nine films we have seen, mostly, US characters being bad and being punished. But there’s something that feels xenophobic in this instalment, whether it’s the algid Norwegian doctor (Norse actress Synnøve Macody Lund, reminding me a bit of Rebecca Ferguson) or her untrustworthy Mexican aides. I suppose screenwriters Stolberg and Goldfinger (returning for the third consecutive instalment) and director Greutert (back from episodes VI and 3D) wanted to explore a new environment, and move away from social commentary after the failure of the requel. But still.

Game Over.
This is the end of the rewatch/ordeal for me and the end of the road for John Kramer. Saw, now a synonym for the torture porn subgenre, has evolved from a small independent horror, to an intriguing trilogy, to a silly soap opera, capped by three post-Elevated Horror attempts at bringing gore back to our screens.
Kramer himself hasn’t lived long enough to see his already twisted ‘philosophy’ bent further to justify personal gain and vendettas, ending up killing pretty much everyone he’s ever been in touch with. Not a great legacy.

Not counting Spiral, we’re left, I believe, with a single significant character on the board. I expect him to be the narrative foothold for the revival of the franchise, announced by Blumhouse with the complicity of original co-creator James Wan, who promised to bring it back to its origins.
We’ll see what game the good doctor wants to play.

Les pistolets en plastique / Plastic Guns, directed by Jean-Christophe Meurisse, co-written with Amélie Philippe, France, 2024 - ⭐⭐½

Sometimes it feels good to pick a random film from Sooner. Being less aware of non-English-language movies, the chance that a title unknown to me is worth the time is much higher.

In this case, I didn’t know the film, the director, any of the actors. The title itself doesn’t give away much. The platform said it’s a comedy.

First scene: while conducting an autopsy, two coroners (not sure if it is the right term here) chat about true-crime documentaries on Netflix and about a legendary, infallible police profiler.
Second scene: the aforementioned police profiler, while waiting to board a flight to Argentina with his family, identifies a guy as Paul Bernardin, a man on the run after allegedly killing his wife and children.
Third scene: two amateur detectives and true-crime enthusiasts embark on their own investigation on the Bernardin case.

At some point, these vaguely related strands more or less coalesce into a full picture. Many characters come and go in the space of a single scene, providing a bit of context or a small development. Some sequences are hilarious (such as the background gags in the Danish police station, the communication issues between the Danish police and the French ones), and some turn to unexpected violence and gore (a payoff for the initial commentary about Netflix).

This is really a strange beast, a bit baffling for the casual viewer, maybe slightly less so for the French audience, who will have recognised the similarities with the unsolved affair Dupont de Ligonnès, itself the subject of a Netflix production (as far as I can tell, the poster of the film is an age-progressed picture of the actual suspect from the real-life case).
Despite the funny moments, I found it enjoyed its own bad taste a bit too much.

Still, it left me curious about Meurisse’s previous work. For the record, I started his previous film Oranges Sanguines, where the imbalance between the ingredients felt too much to digest, revelling too much in grotesque situations and despair. At a certain point I told myself I would stop watching if a certain event happened; it did, and I stopped.

Hokum, written and directed by Damian McCarthy, Ireland, 2026 - ⭐⭐⭐

A few months ago I complained that McCarthy’s new film didn’t have a Belgian theatrical release date, so I was pleasantly surprised to find it was out this week, a sorbet between two Holland/Zendaya/Bernthal main courses.
I was happy to be able to watch the film on a Saturday afternoon, together with another half-dozen people scattered around the smallest room of downtown Brussels’ biggest multiplex.

It’s easy to start seeing the patterns in the author’s work: a few characters, murdered women, an isolated, multi-floor space, haunted objects, inanimate simulacra of living beings that seem to have their own will anyway.
But the budget is higher, so the environment, the cast, the effects get bigger.

I had the impression that this expanded scale made the film slightly unfocused: the inner demons of the lead character - rude American writer Ohm (Adam Scott), travelling to rural Ireland to visit the hotel where his parents spent their honeymoon, a happy place where to spread their ashes - didn’t seem to fully amalgamate with the scary forces from the local folklore.

Should they? Not necessarily. It’s perfectly possible that I missed something that will be clearer on a second watch.
But there are a few aspects in the screenplay that could have been tightened, I believe (not going into details to avoid spoilers).

McCarthy’s previous films had a few (some of which memorable) jump scares, but the ones in Hokum felt more frequent, more noisy, more… James Wan-y. So it made sense to find out that the score was composed by Joseph Bishara, author of all the Conjurings and Insidiouses soundtracks, and lollipop demon himself.

I liked this film, but I wanted to love it. And at some point I hoped it would include the origin story for the cursed bell from Oddity.

Five Nights at Freddy’s 2, directed by Emma Tammi, written by Scott Cawthon, US, 2025 - ⭐⭐

I feel I’m being a bit generous with this one.

Absolutely nothing makes sense in the plot, where we find out that the animatronic-filled pizza parlour/theme park from the first film was actually a remake of a different bigger and scarier and more spectacular place, featuring an indoor river and a really scary-looking mechanical character, called The Marionette (who bears quite a resemblance to our Saw friend Billy). Something horrible went wrong in that place twenty years before, so it was shut down and left untouched, a few miles from the town but completely forgotten.
That’s until McKenna Grace and her crew of paranormal vloggers enter the place and disturb its ghosts, with the help of security guard Mike (not Josh Hutcherson’s security guard Mike! Just another guy with the same job and the same name).
Ihen our heroes from the first film (Hutcherson, younger sister Piper Rubio and troubled not-girlfriend Elizabeth Lail) also discover the same place, for completely unrelated and convoluted reasons, and all plot breaks loose.

The creator of the video game series these films adapt, already credited as a co-writer in the first film, was now left alone to pen the script, and that explains some absurdities that would go completely unnoticed while playing, but become absolutely relevant in a medium where the only goal is to tell a story.

I don’t remember whether it was used much in the marketing campaign, but I suppose the biggest selling point of this film for non-gamers that weren’t discouraged by the first one was reuniting in the cast list Stu Macher and Billy Loomis from Scream. I guess casting Skeet Ulrich, in the intentions of the production, should have felt like adding Laurence Fishburne to the cast of John Wick 2.
In practice, he and Matthew Lillard are both barely present and never share the screen. Furthermore, his acting is really unnatural and distracting, so much so that I thought he was deliberately playing someone with something to hide. But, no.
Ulrich’s presence is not the only nod to Craven’s film, by the way: one specific scene is basically lifted from one of Ghostface’s murders (bar the director wearing a striped jumper)

Wayne ‘Newman’ Knight appears in his usual funnily obnoxious role. His presence and the scary Marionette are what elevates this second chapter a tiny bit above its predecessor.
I’d like to see director Tammi break out from this franchise, and show what she can do with a proper script. Unfortunately, this film doesn’t even try to have a proper ending, so I’m afraid my wish will stay unfulfilled for a while.

貞子 / Sadako, directed by Hideo Nakata, written by Noriaki Sugihara, based on Kōji Suzuki’s novel Tide, Japan, 2019 - ⭐⭐½

I had missed the fact that Nakata had gone back to the Ringuverse twenty years after Ringu 2, probably because of the abundance of sequels with very similar titles (Sadakos with or without 3Ds, with or without Kayako). Anyway, when I found out, I had to catch up.

Sadako here apparently gained the power of reincarnating, so now she is - or maybe has just attached herself to - a little girl.
I suppose that skipping the middle films in the franchise doesn’t help with following the evolution of the lore around the long-haired lady, but I was a bit confused with both the premise and some of the events in the third act. But maybe continuity is not that important in a twenty-year-old, multi-media franchise.

At some point a character says that Sadako used to be all over the internet, so maybe the creepy video we know and love was monetised to death and that’s why, instead of the usual footage, she now cameos in other content creators’ shorts. One of those ‘YouTubers’ disappears, so his sister (who coincidentally is also a doctor taking care of the troubled reincarnation girl) and his agent team up to find out what happened to him, to compose the canonical woman-and-man investigation duo that drives the Ringu series.

All the usual story beats are featured, and at times it felt more like a reboot of the series than a sequel, or perhaps I’m giving too much weight to the similarity between the leading ladies’ names in this film (Akikawa) and the original (Asakawa).

I guess there’s no point in trying to make sense of everything that happens in a J-Horror sequel, but, still, I was expecting more from this late reunion of the director and the film that popularised the genre in the West.

Spiral: From the Book of Saw, directed by Darren Lynn Bousman, written by Pete Goldfinger and Josh Stolberg, US, 2021 - ⭐⭐ (rating unchanged)

Chris Rock announcing his requel of the Saw franchise, four years after Jigsaw, was one of those puzzling moments where two worlds that looked completely unrelated all of a sudden collide, like Edward Norton writing The Incredible Hulk.

As often happens, neither of the two worlds gained much by the impact, resulting in a Saw imitation about a John Kramer imitator. The idea of focusing the plot around police corruption was good and bore social meaning, but the actual result is quite muddled, and it doesn’t feel much deeper than the way Saw VI criticised the US healthcare system.

I can appreciate director Bousman’s intention of trying to start afresh, free from the need to feature Tobin Bell and from the baggage of the convoluted mythology.
The problem is that those elements made the Saw sequels entertaining: the new puppet - Mr. Snuggles - is ugly rather than scary (although: it’s a policepig threatening corrupted police members? Does it make sense?), and the voice of the recorded messages is just… funny? Lacking the gravity and intention of Bell’s tone, it’s no surprise to learn that the production didn’t really know how to solve the problem, settling on… something just when they had run out of time.

A lot of words are spent to justify the ‘spiral’ as a prominent symbol in Jigsaw’s work. I guess that was more apparent for the film’s production design department than for the audience: spirals give colour to Billy-the-puppet’s cheeks, but otherwise they appear just a couple of times in the previous eight films, and are never given any explicit relevance (if memory serves).

Now, if this had been another Saw sequel with the same production value and the same level of casting as its predecessors, it would be just a failed attempt at reviving the franchise: nothing to see, move along.
Unfortunately, its decently prestigious cast elevates the expectations. Samuel L. Jackson ¹ and Max Minghella don’t particularly shine, but the real issue is the person driving this whole endeavour: Chris Rock’s Ezekiel talks and behaves as usual Chris Rock for the first five minutes, just to reveal that this is just a character he is playing. Then he becomes all serious and dramatic (to signify a change of career for the actor? Although he has done serious roles before), but this means keeping for the rest of the film the same expression I have on mornings when I really don’t want to go to work.

And if his acting choices weren’t enough to undermine the film’s dramatic intention, what about the flashbacks where Ezekiel’s younger version is played by Chris Rock wearing a baseball cap backwards?

Novocaine, directed by Dan Berk and Robert Olsen, written by Lars Jacobson, US, 2025 - ⭐⭐⭐

This sounded like a fun variation in the ‘seemingly ordinary guy single-handedly faces a gang of higher-skilled bad guys to avenge his dog/his family’ genre.
In this case, the villains have kidnapped the guy’s girlfriend (like in a Super Mario Bros. game) and his secret power is not a past as a hitman/special forces member, but a condition preventing him from feeling pain.

I liked quite a lot the initial ‘rom-com’ part (Amber Midthunder is very sweet when she doesn’t have to kill Predators, and protagonist Jack Quaid doesn’t have a stubble, so we know we can trust him), so much so that when the story took a specific turn, I didn’t see it coming.
But, from there onwards, the plot just went into self-writing mode.
I absolutely lost interest, especially after realising that the screenwriter equates ’not feeling pain’ to ’not suffering any effect from wounds’. I mean, one would think that all that stuff that’s inside the body has a purpose and a function…

I had not realised the directing duo also wrote and directed two Maika Monroe films that left me quite cold (Villains and Significant Other). Here, someone else wrote the script, but the effect is the same.

-Quaid is not the only one ‘born into art’ in this film: Ray Nicholson does exactly what an actor bearing that family name is expected to do.

The Odyssey, written and directed by Christopher Nolan, based on Homer’s epic poem, United Kingdom/US, 2026 - ⭐⭐⭐⭐½

Let me be ‘old world’. I don’t know whether my experience is shared by many people my age, in Europe or outside, but I have learnt about Greek mythology very early on. I can’t say with certainty that I knew about Ulisse (the Italian name for Odysseus) and his long journey back home before I knew about Superman, Spider-Man and Thor, but it feels like that.
That’s what you get when your family, for generations, has spent summers at a beach identified, in local legends, as the place where Aeneas first arrived in Italy - after fleeing from Troy and before getting to Latium so that his descendants would end up founding a small town called Rome.

So, Homer’s poems are basically included in my factory settings, and the idea of a hero admired for his wit was, even as a kid, much more appealing to me than someone who was just able to run very fast and had embedded armour except for a heel.

This might explain why, for the first twenty minutes of Christopher Nolan’s adaptation, I was a bit impatient: ‘why do we spend so much time in Ithaca? We know the origin story already! Do we need to see Bruce’s parents get killed once again? And what’s with the wooden horse? That’s not even part of the Odyssey, that’s in the Iliad’.
(It turns out that that’s exactly the structure of the first books of the poem, and that the Trojan Horse is described in Virgil’s Aeneid instead, as the Iliad ends before those events)

Anyway, this approach detached me so much that I spent some time noticing that current Batman wants to marry previous Catwoman, whose son is Spider-Man, while Spider-Man’s girlfriend is now surrounded by sand and - wait, am I watching Dune now?
Then Jason Bourne comes in, as usual having forgotten his past.
Furthermore, my train of thought went into: how many of these actors have previously worked with Nolan? Has he fallen out with Tom Hardy? Great to see Elliot Page back in the clan!

All of these thoughts are signs that a film hasn’t grabbed me yet.
I must underline that I didn’t see it in IMAX (that would have cost me two hours in a tram and more than thirty euros for a ticket), so some of the visual amazement many viewers report wasn’t available.
For a long time, this felt like the standard Nolan film: very well executed, but calculated and cold.

Then Samantha Morton appeared, and the film finally started to capture me. Part of it is the fact that her section is definitely a horror sequence. Part of it is that, that point on, the themes that the film wants to discuss began to be clear.

As usual, I don’t want to spoil the film, and even if this is a well-known story, the points that Nolan wants to make may deserve a gradual discovery and personal understanding.
When it all finally clicked for me, during a flashback scene towards the end, I was so overwhelmed by emotion that I cried.

It’s a story about society, gender equality and, above all, human decency.
Odysseus’ cleverness, which I have admired for almost five decades, does come with a dark side, that I probably never considered before.

Resolution, directed by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, written by Justin Benson, US, 2012 - ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (down from ⭐⭐⭐⭐½)

Last week’s appearance of Benson and Moorhead as producers of Man Finds Tape made me want to revisit their first film.

The week-spanning story of Mike (Peter Cilella) trying to help his friend Chris (Vinny Curran who, sorry, will always be American Lello Arena to me) give up his drug addiction through quite drastic measures is, honestly, quite compelling in itself, thanks to an amazing chemistry between the two leads, which completely sells the film as a drama (with a supporting role from the always welcome Zahn McClarnon, and a fun cameo by the young directors).

But the rehab plot was not exactly what I was there for, and I was almost disappointed by the limited space given to the cosmic aspects: my fault, or, better, my memory’s fault, probably mixing it with another ‘cabin in the woods’ film from the same year.

Nevertheless, any momentary disappointment and the confusion triggered by the last line of dialogue dissipated after reflecting on the whole story for a while, and how the film invites us, as horror film lovers, to take some part of responsibility.

Jigsaw, directed by Michael Spierig and Peter Spierig, written by Josh Stolberg and Pete Goldfinger, US, 2017 - ⭐⭐½ (down from ⭐⭐⭐½)

I have pointed out in previous weeks some literary references that may have inspired Saw traps, but I didn’t expect to see Jean-Paul Sartre named (at least, on the web; I haven’t checked the actual film credits) as a co-author of the eighth film of the series. Apparently, it is because of marked similarities between some character details and his play Huis clos/No Exit.

But the core plot remains the same: there are murders and the police are investigating, John Kramer has been dead for sequels, and people are trapped and challenged without realising they would be better off collaborating rather than working against each other (like in the one with Julie Benz).

There is an additional layer of characters and events that made me consider at some point that both the story and the filmmaking (by newcomers to the saga, Predestination’s authors The Spierig Brothers) were a marked improvement compared to the last four episodes.
But this was before the resolution, which is just unbelievable even by Saw standards and brings the whole endeavour down quite a lot.

Evil Dead Burn, directed by Sébastien Vaniček, co-written with Florent Bernard, US, 2026 - ⭐⭐⭐½

‘In-laws’. Take Ready or Not, remove all the fun from it, replace it with Newer-French-Extremity nastiness, add all the usual Necronomicon stuff and there you are, burn baby burn.
The creative team behind Vermines/Infested (which I haven’t seen) does a great job at unrelentingly making you wince and sometimes want to avert your eyes from the screen with Bring Her Back intensity.

What it could have done better is the character work: the father-in-law is insufferably nasty long before anything supernatural happens (I understand, he’s supposed to be the role model for his son), the grandmother is an easy target for comic relief.
The ending goes on a bit too long, but I guess it’s necessary to give closure to the ‘abusive spouse’ theme.
And I know I’m being unnecessarily critical of details, but an ADR line made me cringe much more than any open dishwasher in the film.

Despite all of this, I overall liked it: final girl Souheila Yacoub (from Gaspar Noé’s Climax) is great, the direction is interesting (if you want to win me over, put a skilfully crafted long take in your film), the horror is effective, and there is even a vocal cameo by Alain Chabat.
I didn’t expect this to have any narrative link to my beloved Evil Dead Rise, but I was happy that the whole cold open brought us back to that lake and let Jessica scare us to death.

As I write, I’m also finding out I’ve missed the post-credit scene, also linking back to Lee Cronin’s film.

The Evil Dead, written and directed by Sam Raimi, US, 1981 - ⭐⭐⭐ (up from ⭐⭐½)

After listening to Mark Kermode’s scathing review of Burn, I had to go back to the first film, to doublecheck whether it really is so marvellous and funny and scary.
As you can see, I wasn’t convinced the first time around, and this time I appreciate a bit more what was done with no budget (a bit like for Resolution), although the stupid tree sequence is still there and it all gets very repetitive and uninspired after the cards scene.

I understand the affection for an established director and actor at their starting point, but I’m not so much into Raimi’s oeuvre to just blindly go with it for a half hour more than needed.

Burn After Reading, written and directed by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, US, 2008 - ⭐⭐ (rating unchanged)

I absolutely don’t understand the world’s love for a farce as vapid as this one. Frances McDormand and Richard Jenkins are always great, but the film’s insistence on George Clooney and Brad Pitt pulling funny faces is immensely irritating.

Yes, the two scenes with J.K. Simmons are fun although as unsubtle as the rest of the movie, but that’s really too little.
Forget After Watching, for the second time.

The Endless, directed by Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson, written by Justin Benson, US, 2017 - ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ (up from ⭐⭐⭐⭐½)

The mysteries in Resolution naturally pushed me to its sequel, in search for something to contextualise them.
I wonder whether the link between the two films was known in advance, in 2017, even to the limited number of people who knew about the 2012 one.

It takes a long time for The Endless to establish any serious link, and the first ten minutes or so felt almost disappointing in their ’normality’, as we follow domineering Justin and his naive younger brother Aaron, living a repetitive and unhappy life ten years after they left the ‘UFO death cult’ they grew up in.
Then a videotape received in the post pushes Aaron to convince Justin to go back for one day and one night to their old commune, and - subtly at first but very steadily - a lot of things cast doubt on the secluded community’s lifestyle, and the whole desert they are in.

By the time it went back to the Resolution characters, I had forgotten the reason that brought me there, completely absorbed by the atmosphere and new questions raised by the film.
Some of them are clarified - even a few I didn’t even realise I had -, some are left to interpretation.

The Endless completely wraps its audience in a coherent world, one that will not let you go long after the film has ended.

Area 51, written and directed by Oren Peli, US, 2015 - ⭐½

The other film directed by the creator of Paranormal Activity. Shot in 2010 but released five years later, this is a classic found-footage movie that reminded me a lot of Horror in the High Desert 2, which, in comparison, is a masterpiece.

The plot can be guessed by the title itself, so let’s not waste time on that.
There’s a home invasion section that is difficult to watch because of the sheer stupidity of the characters’ decisions, and that’s still better than the interminable second half in the secret military base.
I have the impression that several scenes are inspired by Quatermass and the Pit, but I won’t go back and check.
Only for completists of Peli’s directorial efforts.

Saw 3D / Saw: The Final Chapter, directed by Kevin Greutert, written by Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan, US, 2010 - ⭐⭐ (up from ⭐½)

Oren Peli didn’t direct Paranormal Activity 2, and neither did Kevin Greutert, who was working on the project before being forcefully pulled back into John Kramer’s unfinished business.

Both titles for this film sound incredibly lazy, but at least one of them prepares us for the endless instances of spikes, needles and pointy things that would have graced our eyes if we went and saw this in a cinema, having learnt nothing from The Final Destination.

This is the one where former young Indiana Jones and Boondock Saint Sean Patrick Flanery gains media visibility by publishing a book called S.U.R.V.I.V.E. (is it an acronym? What does it stand for? Or do the dots only indicate that survival happens one step at a time?), describing the lessons learnt from surviving one of Jigsaw’s traps - although we never saw him in any of the previous films.

It would be an intriguing plot, centring on people who made it through the John Kramer idea of a life-affirming experience, and it gives us the chance to enjoy one more time Tanedra Howard’s Simone, still pissed off about having to cut her own arm in the previous film. She’s probably my favourite character of the saga (sorry, Amanda!).
It also brings back the saga’s oldest character and the oldest setting from the saga, and ties up all the loose ends, as screenwriters Melton and Dunstan finally put an end (although you never know) to the Tales of Hoffman saga.

On the plus side, it’s a bit more narratively streamlined than its predecessors, as the flashback narrative only covers a couple of scenes at the beginning and the end of the film.

But it’s also the film with the nastiest traps so far - and the most fake-looking visual effects -, and it’s pervaded by an incredible amount of misogyny: all female characters suffer fates much worse than their male- counterparts, some of them for no reason at all.

So, despite the reinvigorating last couple of minutes, everybody must have been happy that this was indeed the final chapter for Saw… for a while.

Man Finds Tape, written and directed by Paul Gandersman and Peter S. Hall, US, 2025 - ⭐⭐⭐

Another honest title that makes it clear we are again in found footage/mockumentary territory.
Debuting director duo Gandersman and Hall weave an intriguing story about strange events happening in a small town in Texas.

I won’t spoil where the plot goes, but the two are supported, production-wise, by another, well-established pair of creatives: one scene, specifically, has the same effect as a sign stating ‘Benson and Moorhead were here’.

I was a bit disoriented by the temporal jumps in the story and the different types of camera used having largely different resolutions (for philological reasons, I suppose). But overall, it’s an entertaining and original enough film, populated with faces that looked familiar but that I had not met before.

Lovely, Dark, and Deep, written and directed by Teresa Sutherland, US/Portugal, 2023 - ⭐⭐⭐

Another debut: director Sutherland’s first film features Georgina Campbell as Lennon, a newly appointed ranger of a National Park, full of good intentions but troubled by a past trauma that pushes her to disregard her superiors’ orders to help people.
Her past is also the reason why she sought this job: when she faces the truth behind the frequent disappearances of hikers, she will have to learn the hard way how to overcome her fears and let go.

Rather economical in terms of characters and ‘action’, this film deals with a couple of well-beloved horror subgenres, and overall is able to offer some surprises about where its story is headed.
But, while I can’t really point out what should have been done differently, I was left with the feeling that this could have aspired to be a much more gratifying watch: all the right elements were there, but still something was missing.

HIM, directed by Justin Tipping, co-written with Skip Bronkie and Zack Akers, US, 2025 - ⭐⭐⭐

The reviews for this film were so bad that I postponed watching it even after its arrival on Netflix, despite Jordan Peele’s name attached to it. I couldn’t care less about football (American or otherwise), and a lot of it is over the top and repetitive and overall a bunch of nonsense, and the two parts of the ending are one worse than the other.

Still, this is one of those rare films where atmosphere and the style are enough to keep me entertained.
Everyone on Letterboxd is raving about Julia Fox, whom, I must admit, I didn’t know much about (despite having watched Uncut Gems) and who seems to be an interesting person. Tyriq Withers gives a very different performance from the one in I Know What You Did Last Summer from the same year.

Zoolander, directed by Ben Stiller, co-written with John Hamburg and Drake Sather, US, 2001 - ⭐⭐⭐

Watching this film immediately after HIM made me notice some unexpected plot similarities.

Also known as the only Will Ferrell performance that makes me smile once or twice, Zoolander is considered almost a masterpiece by comedy lovers: I was hoping to enjoy it more than the first time, and I confirm there are some funny bits, but most of the jokes are at the expense of Stiller’s lead character (Bee Gees’ I Started a Joke is very much on point), and laughing at people because they are ‘simple’ is not my kind of fun.

Then there are the dozens of cameos, but not everyone is David Bowie - and some don’t really support escapism today.
On the plus side, it was fun to identify the young man that will become Alexander Skarsgård. And I can happily report that my version of the Magnum is powerful enough to unlock my laptop.

Diary of the Dead, written and directed by George A. Romero, Canada/US, 2007 - ⭐⭐

Kind of the same thing happened while watching Diary of the Dead: that young woman looks a bit like… wait, she looks a lot like… is she really Tatiana Maslany?!

I wish there was more Maslany in this film. Because basically her presence is the only redeeming element in this found-footage that doesn’t even bother to try and be one, plagued with irritating characters (worst of all is the alcoholic English professor who has combat skills ‘because he studied at Eton’), didactic inserts, pedantic insistence that zombies can’t run, and a plot without surprises.

Hotel, written and directed by Jessica Hausner, Austria/Germany, 2004 - ⭐⭐½

The setting and the premise (a young woman takes a job at the reception of a hotel in the German-speaking part of the Alps - with an investigation ongoing about the death/disappearance of a woman) make this film feel like the original version of Cuckoo.
The actual development is much, much different, and very serious.

Rather than supernatural events - which might or might not be at play, thanks to the creepy doll of the Lady of the woods - this one focuses on the unease of being alone in a new place, trying to do your best and fit in-to an environment that has its own unwritten rules.
Yes, that is basically the definition of ‘folk horror’.

For my taste, this was effective in communicating loneliness and dread, but a bit too psychological and introspective, with the few events in the plot not really flowing into an interesting and believable story.
It would probably deserve a more focussed, attentive second watch.

Door Into Silence, written and directed by Lucio Fulci, Italy, 1991 - ⭐⭐

After the successful experience with Don’t Torture a Duckling last week, I decided to watch another Fulci film, chosen at random. It turns out that this was his last film, so it makes perfect sense that it’s all about the idea - and the fear - of death.

The plot follows a man driving across the US, from New Orleans - where he attended the funeral of his father - back to Los Angeles. Along the way, he finds all sorts of frustrating obstacles, from road works to a hearse that doesn’t want to be overtaken. And a mysterious woman driving a red car.

If this description doesn’t sound very enticing, the film isn’t either. You’ll understand what’s going on twenty minutes into the story, and then you’ll have to wait seventy more minutes for Fulci to officially reveal it, just to end on a very silly shot.
For the record, I tried to watch another random film of his the following night, just to stop after a few minutes as a character was being very nasty towards a cat.

À l’interieur / Inside, written and directed by Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo, France, 2007 - ⭐⭐

One of the main French Extremity films I had not yet seen, this one disturbed me more than Martyrs did, because of the topic and the triggering violence that goes on. Béatrice Dalle, queen of the genre, is as deranged as ever as she home-invades, on Christmas eve, the house of pregnant woman Alysson Paradis (sister of Vanessa), with a purpose that soon becomes very clear, and terrifying.

So, part of my low rating is due to my personal taste about what is horrific but acceptable, and what goes too far.
But part of it is objective: the terrible interior, mother CGI shots of the baby reacting to what is happening à l’extérieur are totally unnecessary. And the required suspension of disbelief about some actions by secondary characters is just, itself, extreme.

Backrooms, directed by Kane Parsons, written by Will Soodik, US/Canada, 2026 - ⭐⭐½

And here’s another one of the ‘best-horrors-no-best-films-of-the-year’ that I went to watch with a lot of expectation and, finally, left me cold.
I haven’t yet seen Parsons’ YouTube series, but on paper, the whole idea of liminal horror was intriguing. In practice, not so much.

Maybe it’s because I have spent a lot of time, during my non-military service, walking around the semi-empty rooms of a former boarding school. But a series of yellow spaces with some furniture inside? Not scary, not even unsettling.
At least, not after it becomes clear that the topography is stable: weird as the architecture can be, if you can map a space for repeated visits, it’s no longer scary. If it’s repeatable, no matter how weird the rooms look, it’s not dream logic.

As I watched, I thought about Lost, and I told myself: ’the red room in Twin Peaks did it much better’.
Then of course a red room came up here as well, and I almost felt at home.

This is once again a ‘feature-length film based on a short film’, and, as such, it shows some struggle in reconciling what it once was, and what it aspires to be. The label ‘insert trauma here’ is still sticking out.
Chiwetel Ejiofor is a good actor, so why does he look so unconvincing here?

Anyway, not all is lost. We know that, with insomnia, everything is a copy of a copy of a copy.
The same for the backrooms: something is at work here, feeding on itself to create duplicates that are less and less faithful to the originals.
Is it AI? Is it obsessive rumination over guilt?
That is what Backrooms could successfully point to.

Maybe a future rewatch where I’m not in a room filled with teenagers constantly whispering to each other would help me focus on that.
For the time being, claims that this film will become as influential as The Blair Witch Project feel greatly exaggerated.

See How They Run, directed by Tom George, written by Mark Chappell, United Kingdom/US, 2022 - ⭐⭐⭐ (down from ⭐⭐⭐½)

My memory of this film was: a lot of fun.
This rewatch did not live up to the expectations. Sam Rockwell and Saoirse Ronan are hilarious, as is the rest of the cast (second film in two weeks featuring Ruth Wilson); but the script, strong at the beginning, seems to trust too much in its meta premise (what if we wrote a Whodunnit inspired by The Mousetrap, the way Hollywood would?), while the insistence on using split screen is a dynamic, but unconvincing, choice.

undertone, written and directed by Ian Tuason, Canada/US, 2025 - ⭐⭐⭐½

I thought a lot about Paranormal Activity during this film (so I’m not surprised director Tuason has been hired to write and direct the next instalment of that series), but it would perhaps be more appropriate to describe it as an audio version of Scott Derrickson’s Sinister.

America(Canada?)-based podcaster Evy (Nina Kiric) and Londoner Justin (Adam DiMarco, in a voice-only performance) host The Undertone podcast, which deals with unsettling paranormal stories. Although Evy plays the part of the sceptic in the show, she’s the one who’s affected more by a series of mysterious mp3s they received via email. But that’s because she lives alone in her family house with her terminally-ill and unresponsive mother, and because the timezone difference between the two hosts leads her to record the podcast at 3AM - and we know from The Exorcism of Emily Rose (Derrickson again) that that’s not a good time to be awake.

Objectively, I would have all the elements to complain that this is not a good plot: the worst accusations you can throw at late-stage trauma-based horror would be valid.
Tuason pushes as much as possible on audio horror, which unfortunately means nursery rhymes and the good old myth of subliminal messages hidden in popular tunes.

Still, I was tense for most of the running time, thanks to the vast, dark negative space that fills the frame in most scenes: who knows what is hiding in the shadows?

I know I will watch this film again. But I don’t know if I will like it more, or be bored by it.

Saw VI, directed by Kevin Greutert, written by Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton, US, 2009 - ⭐⭐⭐

I mentioned last week that a trap in Saw V reminded me of the pound of flesh from The Merchant of Venice, and here it is, this chapter opens with a trap based on exactly that concept, to literarily punish - sorry, offer a new chance at life for - two unscrupulous money lenders. Final proof that behind the expressionless face of the new Jigsaw hides an avid reader.
Saw VI tackles corporate greed and the social issue of health insurance, and this finally gives some kind of sense or motivation to a sequel (although, one of the characters is punished because he didn’t quit smoking: a bit too harsh if you ask me).
The final twist is actually satisfying, and there are some memorable sequences (the carousel trap, for instance).
Plus, this may be the first Saw where we spend some time with the victims before they wake up trapped in a basement somewhere.

All in all, this is a (maybe, the) good sequel post-Saw III.
The forward plot is, once again, the investigation to identify the new Jigsaw, but, this time, it turns out almost thrilling, with some twists and turns in itself.
The flashback part, once again, rewrites the past in multiple ways, beyond any chance of believability, but Shawnee Smith returns and I enjoyed the absurdity of it all. At this point there seem to be more John Kramer acolytes than police officers in this town. Yet at the same time, nobody really seems to believe in his philosophy.
I feel a bit sad for Jigsaw, so self-celebrating when nobody understands him.

September 5, directed by Tim Fehlbaum, co-written with Moritz Binder and Alex David, Germany/US, 2024 - ⭐⭐⭐

I missed this film in theatres, but maybe it was a good thing: the accents here are all over the place (including for the American characters) and the background is often noisy, so I had to turn the subtitles on right at the beginning.
I expected to like this film more.
I appreciated the fact that it never leaves the ABC premises to show the events happening at the Olympic village, turning the well-known historical facts into an unclear situation where nobody is really sure of what’s going on. It brought me back to the fear and shock of 09/11.
But the most interesting promise of the trailer, the risk that the journalists’ work might help the terrorists, and the professional/personal conflict that should arise, is solved quite soon and quite quickly, culminating in a ridiculous scene where the German police orders ABC to stop broadcasting, and all it takes for them to retreat is being shouted at by Peter Sarsgaard.
Was Germany really so insecure and scared of itself in 1972?
The film won Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Director and Best Supporting Actress and five more awards at the 2025 Deutscher Filmpreis, so maybe it really was.

Windfall, directed by Charlie McDowell, co-written with Justin Lader, Andrew Kevin Walker and Jason Segel, US, 2022 - ⭐⭐

In the last year of high school, Italian students learn about a number of Italian writers of the 20th century, and few of them leave teenagers as indifferent as Italo Svevo, a friend of James Joyce whose novels showcase inept men, adults who can’t take decisions and live their life in mediocrity, often lying to themselves about their motivations.
I suspect his books hit much differently for middle-aged readers, but I digress.

My point is that I didn’t give a second thought to Italo Svevo in thirty years, until I watched this film, where the protagonist (Jason Segel) is indeed a man who doesn’t seem to know what he wants: he breaks into a billionaire’s property, but then he doesn’t know what to do, and when he’s caught by the owner and his wife, he doesn’t know how to deal with them. Things happen to him rather than because of him.
Opposite him, the tech mogul (Jesse Plemons), brimming with alpha-ness and quick decisions.
Can you imagine a film where you root for the selfish, arrogant rich guy rather than the supposedly principled common man?
Well, here it is.
I have to assume that that is the point the film wants to make, but, if so, it’s a rather uninteresting way of doing it.
Or should we root for the wife (Lily Collins, also the director’s spouse), enjoying a wealthy life but, it seems, regretting her marriage?
Everybody in this story is annoying, and not much happens, unless for contrived reasons.

Still, this film has been co-written by Andrew Kevin Walker, the screenwriter of Se7en.
Director McDowell, son of Malcolm and Mary Steenburgen, is also (with co-writer Justin Lader) the author of The One I Love, a film I constantly forget I have already watched.

Profondo Rosso / Deep Red, directed by Dario Argento, co-written with Bernardino Zapponi, Italy, 1975 - ⭐⭐⭐½ (down from ⭐⭐⭐⭐)

When I was little, an older kid in my neighbourhood used to boast that he had watched Profondo Rosso, and survived. It was the eighties, and in Italy the admiration for Dario Argento flowed freely. I watched it for the first time five years ago, and some of that hype must have been still present in my subconscious.
This second watch was triggered by Chuck Jordan’s review, and their footnotes mentioning it about a likely inspiration for some of the Saw aesthetics.
Since I had survived it already once, and it didn’t exactly trouble my sleep, I could experience the film with more objective eyes, finding it more in line with my impression of other Argento films: stylish, but superficial, ineffective at creating a haunting atmosphere (at least, fifty years after the fact: maybe the effect back then was stronger).
There are unsettling scenes, both very explicit - like the mechanical puppet one (that has no relation with anything else) - and very subtle - such as the Blue Bar out of Nighthawks, where nobody really moves. But the story is very thin, and the investigation is just a pretext.

Forget David Hemmings, Daria Nicolodi, Glauco Mauri and Gabriele Lavia: the real reasons to watch the film are the amazing art nouveau villa, and the soundtrack by Goblin, heavily inspired by Tubular Bells, but with a warmer prog-rock sound.
And the unsettling child song, that will resonate in your head for days.
This was the last film for Clara Calamai, a historic figure in Italian cinema, here playing Carlo’s mother with strong Baby Jane vibes.
The creepy child, Nicoletta Elmi, features in several giallos from the period, but was better known in my generation for playing the goth girl (back then we used to call them ‘dark’) in a high-school-set sit-com from the mid-Eighties, which all teenagers used to love at the time (but I suspect was actually pretty terrible).
Some animal cruelty, no doubt real, is quite upsetting. Unless that is one of the effects created by Carlo Rambaldi, who later went on to win three Oscars and design the Alien xenomorph and E.T.

I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, written and directed by Osgood Perkins, Canada/US, 2016 - ⭐⭐⭐½

I rewatched this film in a few sittings, as a mind cleanser to put me in an oneiric state before going to bed. Every time I see it, I feel like I appreciate it a bit more (but finally my rating hasn’t changed). Did I ever notice the upside-down chair?
I really loved the ectoplasmic appearances.
Unfortunately, I don’t feel this was the right role for Ruth Wilson: nothing wrong in her performance, it’s probably just that I am used to seeing her in parts with a different energy.

Non si sevizia un paperino / Don’t Torture a Duckling, directed by Lucio Fulci, co-written with Roberto Gianviti and Gianfranco Clerici, Italy, 1972 - ⭐⭐⭐⭐

I’m not sure, but I think I watched Profondo Rosso in English. With Hemmings in the lead, it seemed natural that - even with recognisable Italian actors’ faces - everyone spoke English. But that film is set in Rome and filmed in Turin: big cities where it wouldn’t be unusual to hear a language other than Italian spoken.
Lips are pronouncing English words in this film too (although many of the adult actors here are not Italian, Thomas Milian, Barbara Bouchet, Florinda Bolkan had all been around Cinecittà for some time, and presumably could speak the language to a degree), but, set as it is in a remote village of Southern Italy, it felt just too unnatural to me to watch it in that language: I waited until I could find an Italian-dubbed version.

This was my first Fulci and, judging by his fame and the title, I was expecting a much more brutal film: instead, I was positively surprised by its restraint - probably because of the topic it deals with -, and even the nude scene with Barbara Bouchet is quite sweet.
I think it captures well, almost to a folk horror level, life in a small rural centre, precariously balanced between superstition and religion, the need to find a culprit for terrible events, and the eagerness to accuse someone who’s ‘different’.

The scene in the cemetery, soundtracked by the Ornella Vanoni song, is striking.

For non-Italians, ‘paperino’, beyond translating to ‘duckling’, is also the Italian name for Donald Duck, making the film title only slightly less confusing.