PIN

Two brothers, Leon and Ursula, raised in a wealthy family, receive life advice from Pin, a mannequin used by their doctor father in his office. Ursula soon realizes that Pin is just a mannequin and it is her father who gives it a voice, but Leon is firmly convinced that the doll is alive and considers it his only true friend. One night, the father of the two children catches Leon talking to Pin and decides to get rid of the mannequin, but a tragic car accident will lead to the death of their parents that same night. The years pass, Ursula grows up normally, but Leon manifests, in an increasingly marked way, an obsessive attachment to Pin, whom he has kept in the attic and with whom he regularly converses. But the situation deteriorates when Ursula begins to go out with a boy, considered by Leon and Pin as the possible cause of the disintegration of their small happy family nucleus. "Who is at the bottom of that staircase..." is a small but pleasant thriller made at the end of the 1980s, an anomalous product for that era, when the market of celluloid chills often and willingly relied on special effects and abundant doses of gore. Instead, "Pin" (this is the original title and certainly less catchy compared to the appealing but misleading one imposed by the Italian distribution) has a very classic and intimate thriller structure, played on expectations, atmosphere, and the protagonist's psychological ambiguity, who is quickly revealed to be afflicted by obvious mental disorders and a morbid attachment to his sister (which never falls into the banal). The protagonist's madness (an unsettling David Hewlett, strange and disturbing with an innocuous good boy appearance) does not stem from any childhood trauma (although he witnesses a sexual encounter between his mother and the doll Pin), but from an internal process triggered by a wrong, harmful education, entrusted to an extremely cold relationship with an unusual instructor (Pin) and a lack of communication with the parents, seen as severe and unattainable figures, certainly repressive; they realize too late the damage they had inflicted on their son and the possible repercussions that would manifest in the child's perception of reality, who, little by little, would demonstrate a total identification with his educator. Therefore, we are not facing a true horror but a psychological thriller that winks at Hitchcock and Polanski (but there is also something of "Dead Ringers" by Cronenberg). Well directed and well acted, definitely worth watching.