TUNNEL

Two young people, presumably a couple, play hide and seek. A gangster is about to commit a crime. A rough and burly man vents his anger and virility on an inflatable doll. Three distinct stories united only by the place where they occur: a dark and surreal tunnel. "Tunnel" is a short film produced by the Cinema Laboratory of the University of Tor Vergata and directed by Roberto Palma. We are not dealing with a purely horror short film because any aspect that could be relevant to the genre is omitted or treated with extreme superficiality. Instead, "Tunnel" is a work that aims to play on the atmospheres, sets, and bizarre, highly oniric personalities of the characters who act during the short duration of the short film. "Tunnel" wants to be more than a "simple" horror, it wants to be a product capable of stunning the viewer or at least making them reflect on delicate themes covered by a thin layer of psychological and philosophical subtlety: the true protagonist of the story is not just the Tunnel (which gives the title to the film) but the monstrosity and perversion that strikes and dwells in the human mind and is capable of generating "monsters" that are real and not the classic (but always welcome) imaginary monsters typical of the horror genre. Rather pretentious and sophisticated ideas, those behind "Tunnel", which only if treated with professionalism and commitment could have given rise to something sufficient. Thus, Roberto Palma wants to overreach, going beyond his potential, and the final result is comparable to a headless smoothie, a tangle of silly and superficial stories seasoned with completely anonymous characters. In "Tunnel", confusion reigns, not because the subject matter is bad but because it is poorly presented, but because the subject on which such a short film is based is totally abstract if not altogether absent. We are dealing with a product without a story, which revolves around itself and tries to complicate itself and become hermetic unnecessarily, just to dress itself with an excessively pretentious and serious tone that becomes even annoying and irritating. Roberto Palma's direction is extremely minimalist to the point of being elementary, and there is a total lack of technique throughout the work (keeping in mind that this is a short film made with a meager budget); even the performances barely reach sufficiency. In conclusion, "Tunnel" is a short film without a story and incredibly pretentious, irritating, and made in an overly amateurish manner. In the Italian landscape dedicated to independent short films, there are much more valid products.