TUTTO MUORE

A man returns home after a day of work and finds a very strange behavior in his wife. The woman faints, vomits, and mumbles phrases without apparent meaning. The two prepare to go to sleep, but an unsettling presence haunts their home and the woman's mind. In his third attempt in the world of independent cinema, former musician Stefano Visintin makes a short film that tries to continue a personal analysis of the mental dimension of the human being, creating a horror full of dreamlike atmospheres of sure interest. After the shorts "Vittima del desiderio umano" and "Dimensioni", the director offers us "Tutto muore", a small parable about death and the dark secrets of a couple that seems to live in a limbo suspended between daily life and the spectral "non-life" that the same daily life generates. Already from the original opening titles, where the actors' names are listed on gravestones, including birth and death dates, a macabre interest in the decadent theme addressed can be noticed: death. With a sort of unusual flash-forward, we are introduced to the oppressive fragment of the protagonist's life, a woman about whom we know very little and who seems to suffer from unsettling visions that materialize through an unsettling figure of a woman dressed in black. Mental or real ghosts, tragic or liberating actions, living dying or living dead, everything is left to the interpretation of the viewer, free to read in those ten minutes of visions existential maladies or a more classic ghost story. The great freedom of interpretation left on the entire work could, however, cause a boomerang effect. It is a tendency perhaps too frequent in recent Italian independent production to draw heavily from Lynchian surrealism to tell stories that seem excessively cryptic, thus giving the impression that the author's minor concern is to "tell" a story, to infuse the entire work with that aura of easy artisticity. Sacrificing entertainment and clarity of exposition to pave the way to various themed festivals is, however, incorrect for the viewer who comes across these works, who might feel like a gatecrasher at a party where they know no one. Beyond an excess of abstraction at the narrative level, "Tutto muore" appears undeniably as a well-made work. Visintin's direction is very careful and capable of creating an excellent atmosphere of unsettling rarefaction, supported by good use of lighting and a suggestive editing. The suspense scenes also appear well orchestrated, probably winking at modern Asian ghost stories. As often happens in independent productions, the actors do not offer a particularly brilliant performance, but in this case, we are not even at excessively amateur levels. Therefore, "Tutto muore" appears as an interesting work, as is certainly the talent that lies behind the project. A greater "freshness" in the narration would have, however, benefited the already good overall result.