THE MOTH DIARIES

After the suicide of her father, Rebecca is no longer the same, but the will to move on leads her to enroll in a prestigious school. Here the girl finds the complicity of her dear friend and contemporary Lucy, until a new and mysterious student, Ernessa, completely captures Lucy's attention. Concerned about her best friend, who appears more insensitive and emaciated every day, Rebecca begins to believe that Ernessa is actually a vampire, and the strange bloody events that occur within the school seem to confirm it. The more experienced horror film viewer knows how important the novel "Carmilla" by Sheridan Le Fanu was, a precursor to the modern vampire story and an inspiration for a multitude of films, especially in the glorious 1970s, when the combination of horror and eroticism then in vogue allowed directors to indulge in the lesbian-sexy suggestions suggested in the novel. With "The Moth Diaries," a cinematic adaptation of the eponymous novel by Rachel Klein, "Carmilla" is explicitly cited as a school text studied during the literature course and it is precisely Le Fanu's work that provides the spark for the horror story, putting the idea in the protagonist's mind of the possible vampiric nature of Ernessa. Of course, with "The Moth Diaries" we are not in the territories of "Vampyros Lesbos" or "Vampiri Amanti" and the entire story takes on the tones of a teen drama that plays with vampirism on the double edge of reality/suggestion. And this is the particularity of a story that otherwise would really have little or nothing original, bringing to the stage the usual clichés about problematic adolescence and fascinating and magnetic vampires. With a certain female enthusiasm, the director Mary Harron goes to deepen the psychological aspect of the story, playing on the fragile mental condition of the protagonist, recently orphaned and therefore prone to a form of post-traumatic depression that could play bad tricks on her perception of reality. Is Ernessa a vampire or not? The question hovers over the story for the entire duration of the film. We, who see everything through the (perhaps) distorted gaze of Rebecca, obviously suspect that the cold freshman is a bloodsucker and what happens in the school, with deaths and disappearances, leads us in this direction. Mary Harron, who in the past has tried to translate into images "American Psycho" by Bret Easton Ellis, has an elegant touch and a particular attention to the twisted psyche of her protagonists, but the film does not convince more than that precisely because of the narrative weakness that lies beneath. It's okay to press the pedal on the uncertainty of the plausibility of the story, but the story remains a huge déjà-vu and the erotic and horrific suggestions that the material could have offered remain completely in the shadow. There is very little blood and the obvious sexual complicity that is established between Lucy and Ernessa, as well as the fascination that the latter also has on Rebecca, remain in the background, without ever explicating the erotic tension of the homosexual relationship that is clearly read between the lines. Good and convincing Sarah Bolger in the role of the protagonist, less suited the model Lily Cole ("Parnassus," "Snow White and the Hunter") in the role of Ernessa, who lacks the charm and sensuality that the character would have required. "The Moth Diaries" is worth watching and does not bore because a vaguely interesting cut has been given to the story that raises doubts about the veracity of what is being watched. But at the same time it is a film that struggles to be remembered, that does not capture as it should/should have, that resembles too many other things. In short, a half failure.