THE FAIRY

A little girl loses her baby tooth and her mother advises her to put it under her pillow because the tooth fairy would take it away leaving a coin. The little girl accepts the advice and that same night she puts her tooth under her pillow. The next day, the little girl tells her mother that she received a visit from the fairy, but the woman does not pay attention until she is summoned by the teacher who informs her that she has confiscated from the little girl an ancient coin and a box full of baby teeth that the little girl had gotten from her classmates. Asking her daughter for explanations, the woman learns that the fairy comes every night to visit her and that she wants teeth… many teeth! « The Fairy » is a doubly singular product. On the one hand, we are dealing with a short film that is nothing more than a pilot for a completely Italian horror TV series, a sort of « Masters of Horror » with a macabre/fairy-tale flavor called « Fairytales », produced by One More, a Roman production company with some important advertising spots and music videos to its credit. On the other hand, because, according to the producers, it is the first TV series shot with the new techniques of stereoscopy, that is, in 3D (although the film I watched was in 2D), to keep up with the times. But will such innovation and grandeur coincide with a quality worthy of so many words? Watching « The Fairy », one can calmly nod because quality really seems to be the keyword, in front of what, under everyone's eyes, is a product of excellent craftsmanship. Directed by Ascanio Malgarini and Christian Bisceglia, the short film in question has the great merit of showing an international packaging, a nice business card for our country to be able to stand out worldwide also in terms of the television sector, a real point of no return for so many domestic productions swallowed up by the graveyard of the cathode-ray tube. « The Fairy » wants to tell us an adult story taking the point of view of a little girl, the classic story of fairies and magic that turns into a macabre poetry of specters. The turning point of this perspective is the lens through which the event is viewed: as long as the viewer approaches the event through the eyes of the little girl, the presence that haunts the film is the tooth fairy of so many popular tales, the only point of contact provided by an adult to the events that take place at night in the little girl's room. At the moment, however, when it is an adult observing the narrative, the perspective changes and the fairy world turns into a nightmare surely closer to the viewer, a terrifying nightmare made of resentful specters. The way Bisceglia and Malgarini handle this change of perspective is masterful, with a few minutes (about twenty) they manage to tell a story giving it an incredible sense of completeness, so much so that at the end of the viewing one has the feeling of having watched a feature film for the breadth of breath that can be given to the entire story. A complete film, therefore, despite the language of the short film, and this is already a great achievement, since the problem of this expressive medium is precisely the difficulty of finding a story suitable for the reduced running time. Borrowing some typically American suggestions, with non-casual references to Jonathan Liebesman's horror « Al calare delle tenebre », « The Fairy » presents a packaging of all respect with excellent photography, constantly shifted towards leaden gray-blue colors, and a particularly inspired direction, which shows a virtuosic flair already from the long initial tracking shot. Very good also the sense of unease that the short film manages to convey to the viewer, thanks also to a couple of really terrifying sequences, especially the final one. In the role of the mother protagonist, we find Harriet McMasters-Green, already the protagonist of « Smile » by Francesco Gasperoni. In short, « The Fairy » is really a work that is worth it, an all-Italian short film that has the potential to seriously compete even in the international market. At this point, it is hoped that the « Fairytales » project can be completed in its entirety and that we can see it soon.