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The modesty of the scale and the gravity of the approach are suggested in the opening credits, the director's title card cuts from a filthy kitchen sink to a wide seaside vista. The house is a deathly site, a junkie's suicide is the official story, the widow (Daria Nicolodi) moves back in with her son (David Colin Jr.) and new husband (John Steiner). On the other side is the jealous spirit with unfinished business, acting through the glowering tyke in increasingly alarming ways. "A big boy like you, and you still wanna sleep with your mama." Family matters in Mario Bava's masterfully unsettled swansong, thus the thoroughgoing deformation of domestic spaces in collaboration with his son Lamberto. A zoom on a bedroom mirror pans over to a close-up of sleeping eyes suddenly open, the child's reflection on a window pane gazes down at the backyard swing that sways on its own. The razor blade between piano keys, the brick wall behind curtains, the single drop of blood on a pricked forearm. Altman's Images is the point of departure, the oversized porcelain hand is a decayed palm fondling the protagonist in her dreams. "Aren't you supposed to be afraid of the dark?" "Not anymore." Shadows in the cellar are projected from a cutout in the family portrait, viscera is a doll's stuffing pulled out for the camera. Rattled, bruised, slashed as she labors to construct normalcy on top of trauma, the heroine confronts the vortex in a sustained close-up, licking her lips while her hair writhes from side to side. "That was a freaky one!" Furie (The Entity) and Kent (The Babadook) absorb its cinematic lessons. With Ivan Rassimov, Paul Costello, and Nicola Salerno.
--- Fernando F. Croce |