FIONA GLASCOTT IN CONTRAORA: HOUSE OF SHADOWS

Italian family skeletons unearthed by an Irish wife

Controra: House of Shadows is an Italian-Irish coproduction in which an Irish wife turns up a host of family skeletons in her Italian husband's imposing ancestral family closets. It's a visually splendid film. Unfortunately it may end by offering more to look at than think about, more images than resolved action.

Controra is also a genre film. A reviewer has called it "a stylish return to the Italian giallo" -- a word that In the Italian book world simply means detective story, but in movies refers to lurid thrillers, the bloody horror-movie kind Dario Argento is famous for. If it's "giallo," Rossella De Venuto's new movie, sparing with the gore, might best be called "giallo lite." The filmmakers have alternately described it as "a paranormal thriller" or "a supernatural thriller." Let's just say things do go bump, but in the day, not the night.

Contora's story setup immediately calls to mind Luchino Visconti's dark, lush cult classic Sandra/Vaghe stelle dell'orsa (1965; you can watch the entire film on YouTube here) . In both films, an aristocratic Italian expatriate returns to southern Italy (Puglia, in this case) with a foreign spouse to a grand, dusty family house full of ghosts. This time we don't have Claudia Cardinale, though the foreign spouse Megan (Irish actress Fiona Glascott) has pretty alabaster breasts which, in the style of today's cinema, she bares right away, for a brief sex scene with her husband, Leo (Pietro Ragusa). (The erotic excitement dies down after that.) Aside from the distinguished precedent, given the setup, we can assume the return of Leo after many years away will lead to the unearthing of some dark family secrets. But the opening conceit is that here it's during the "controra," or hottest time of the day, when only mad dogs and Englishmen (or in this case, Irish women) go out, that evil spirits appear in the shadows. Megan is the one who starts seeing them.

In Sandra/Vaghe stelle dell'orsa there were suspicions of relatives who delivered the heroine's Jewish father up to the Nazis, and little doubt about the intensity of her semi-incestuous youthful relationship with her brother (Jean Sorel). Leo doesn't seem to have been involved in anything; his character is rather wasted and through much of the film we don't even know where he is or what he's doing. But his uncle, Monsignor Domennico (Salvatore Lazzaro), who raised him and his siblings, is being considered for canonization, for his miraculous healings -- and a brother, Nicola (Federico Castelluccio, who played an Italian hit man in "The Sopranos"), is a priest now. A Father Van Galen, putatively German (Italian born Ray Lovelock), has come to investigate Monsignor Domenico's claim to sainthood. Sainthood? We would do right to be suspicious and the filmmakers seem rather dubious about Catholic morals. Meanwhile Megan languishes in the huge room she wanted to sleep in, suffering from scary visions and beginning to become suspicious about events in Leo's family when he and his siblings were very young.

Megan is an artist and she draws pictures of all the visions she has, which will provide a story of the house's secrets. Despite being tormented by visions, she somehow rallies and turns into a surprisingly energetic amateur detective, so that the film becomes a "giallo" in both the book and the movie senses, with some revelations, we are hardly surprised to learn, of terrible events in the past. But the ending is rushed, delivering the many events Megan unearths in a clattering jumble during the movie's final moments. Atmospheric music is effectively used throughout, and the vast, shadowy images and delicate yellow-tinted colors never cease to be a pleasure to the eye, even if the revelations seem a little boilerplate for this kind of film, and somewhat superficially sketched in, with help from the Irish artist protagonist. Dialogue is more in English than Italian, and there are reportedly some problems with the all-Italian dubbed version for local consumption. In the screener, some German dialogue was subtitled only in Italian. This is, needless to say, not the work of art Visconti's film was, nor can even this handsome cinematography rival Armando Nannuzzi's exceptionally lush black and white images for the 1965 film. But for fans of arty low-keyed horror movies this might be worth a watch.

Controra: House of Shadows (the Italian title is simply Controra), 85 mins., debuted at Galway Film Fleadh 10 July 2013, and opened in Italy 6 June 2014; Fantastic Film Festival, Neufchatel, Switzerland, 7 July. Screened for this review as part of SFFS New Italian Cinema series.

Showing in NIC at Vogue Theater, San Francisco, November 20, 2014, 8:45 p.m.

_________________
©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.