VIGILANZA NOTTURNA

A young man goes to his workplace, a complex of pavilions where he works as a night watchman. The girl who did the evening shift tells him, however, of a strange accident: a man sneaked into one of the warehouses and bit the wrist of one of the guards before fleeing. The fear that this man might return haunts the night watchman. Directed by the twenty-six-year-old Francesco Borrasso, "Vigilanza Notturna" is one of those short films that leaves you a bit bewildered due to the visible discrepancy between intentions and results. With already seven short films to his credit (including the audience award winner at the Petite Lumiere Film Festival "Sogni di miele") and several literary publications, Borrasso seeks to pay homage with "Vigilanza notturna" to a certain type of 80s b-movie, a practice increasingly common among young filmmakers in our country, and in particular targets the zombie subgenre. The result is not very convincing for several reasons, starting with a certain clumsiness in the realization that inevitably affects the overall performance of the work. The film is produced with few resources - absolutely acceptable and often a true reason for interest in underground productions -, however, those few are poorly utilized and if the makeup effects leave much to be desired (the zombie effect is very similar to a cake smashed on the actor's face), the locations also seem quite unsuitable. But what weighs most on "Vigilanza notturna" are a series of blatant errors that could have been avoided with a bit of care. Think, for example, of the shadow of the microphone that enters some shots, or the unforgivable visible shadow of the operator on the protagonist's white shirt, or even the actress reading the dialogues directly from a sheet poorly hidden by the screen of a laptop. All errors that following the logic of "good first take" we surely would not have encountered. The screenplay, by Emanuele Mattana from his own story, features some dialogues that probably suffer too much from the literary origin of the work, alternated with others a bit banal to which the unconvincing acting of the actors does not contribute, which in some cases can be defined as truly amateur. The positive aspect is surely the rhythm: "Vigilanza notturna" lasts about 18 minutes (usually the short film that lasts more than 15 minutes is at risk of redundancy) however Borrasso managed to give it a good rhythm and the same idea that is the basis of the story undoubtedly captures the viewer's attention from the beginning. Surely with more care for details and attention even for the simplest things, the result could have been very different and absolutely better, also because the starting material had potential.