ECHO

A young woman breaks down with her car in the middle of the countryside and, as if that weren't enough, her phone battery dies, leaving her with no way to communicate with the outside world and ask for help. The only thing left for her to do is walk along the forest in search of a place where she can call for rescue. Things seem to be going well when the young woman finds herself in front of a small house inhabited by a kind elderly lady who offers her hospitality. But not everything is as serene and peaceful as it seems, and the house hides something mysterious that would be better not to discover. Within a landscape of independent productions characterized by films that, beyond their artistic value, always seek the safest and most immediate way to attract the public and therefore use the most popular genres of the moment, there are also authors who, on the contrary, follow autonomous paths to create original and atypical products. This is the case of the young Genoese director Giulia Savi, who, in her third short film, makes a psychological thriller titled "Echo", with tones closer to drama than to classic horror. Yet, to be honest, the first minutes of "Echo" do not seem to show a certain originality and the starting point of the film is very simple: a young woman who gets stranded in an isolated place, the phone that, as if by magic, runs out of battery and a house in the middle of the forest inhabited by a kind but ambiguous-looking lady. But it is precisely from this already-seen plot that the two screenwriters, Giulia Savi and Giuseppe Anderi (who seem to have drawn inspiration from a dream of the director herself), manage to build a plot that gradually abandons the usual clichés to tell a story centered on the idea of loneliness, always considered the greatest fear inherent in the human soul and in close correlation with old age. A cyclic and common evil that can strike any of us, and it is in this direction that the choice of not providing any temporal or geographical reference about where the story takes place and not giving names to the two protagonists should be interpreted. A demanding and not one of the simplest subjects to develop, which, however, the director manages to represent in more than praiseworthy manner thanks to a solid screenplay that is largely based on a long series of deliberately banal and full of commonplaces dialogues precisely to underline the incommunicability between the two women; an example is the conversation about the weather conditions and the half-seasons, or the attempt of the elderly woman to entertain the girl by making her taste a sweet she has prepared for the occasion. All these elements contribute to building an innocuous situation and, at the same time, ready to degenerate at any moment, thus creating a tension never evident, but that moves silently throughout the film until it explodes in a final sequence that recalls, albeit with different premises and developments, a cult classic like "Ballata macabra" by Dan Curtis. Technically valid, also thanks to a photography (cared for by Maurizio Marras) that tends to make the interiors of a rather unsettling house very bright, "Echo" can rely on a not very dynamic direction, but careful and attentive to compose geometric and highly symbolic frames, especially those that immortalize the two protagonists having dinner sitting at opposite ends of the table almost to show also visually the actual distance between the two. Also worth mentioning is the excellent soundtrack, always in step with the moments of the story and characterized by the use of an echo of voices (hence the title of the film) that underlines the discomfort of the young woman and the negative effects that the house is having on her. Other positive notes come from a cast up to the task and composed of the talented Manuela Parodi ("La luna su Torino") and a Paola Marini Ragni whose acting style, posed and theatrical, proves more than adequate to give depth to her character. Within the technical crew, however, a mention is deserved by the photographer Valter Torielli, author - in collaboration with the short film's author herself - of a suggestive poster that hints at the presence of something dark and unsettling within the story. "Echo", in conclusion, is a complex product but capable of capturing the attention even of those who prefer more bloody films and anchored in the more classic dynamics of the genre.