VISIONS

The FBI's special units, guided by radio by Dr. Leemen, penetrate Spider's lair, a terrible serial killer who is spreading panic in the city. In the room are the killer's last victims still alive, but in reality, it is a trap and both the prisoners and the special agents are killed. Dr. Leemen considers himself responsible for the massacre for not having intuited Spider's plan, so he decides to retire from his profession as an FBI profiler and goes to work as a psychiatric consultant in a hospital. Here he meets Matthew, a boy who has just woken up from a coma and who remembers little of his past but who, on the other hand, has visions about Spider's actions. After the initial uncertainties, the doctor decides to use Matthew precisely to reopen the Spider case, hoping that the boy can help him capture the serial killer once and for all. Smile. Uncertainty. Discouragement. The smile – which sometimes turns into a boisterous laugh – is the one that the viewer inevitably puts on their lips when watching "Visions," a continuous and unstoppable concentrate of banalities accompanied by dialogues and narrative choices that ensure unintentional comedy. Uncertainty, however, arises at regular intervals in the viewer's mind because one wonders how, in the manifest crisis of Italian genre cinema, it is possible to aim and complete films like this. Discouragement grips the viewer at the end of the show because one realizes that the crisis mentioned earlier seems really destined to last if the sporadic examples of today's Italian horror are called "Visions," which are not only mostly of medium-low quality but also generally poorly distributed. But what doesn't work in Luigi Cecinelli's debut? A bit of everything, one would say, starting with the ramshackle screenplay by Andrea Del Monte ("At the Right Moment"). Everything begins with an improbable prologue based on CGI helicopters, SWAT, and a trap with flies that would be original but turns out to be only terribly stupid. Even in this prologue, the poor work done on the dialogues that dwell on the warnings (not listened to) of Dr. Leemen and the respective (and also unwarranted, if you want) sense of guilt of the same, as well as the flat and unintentionally comic verbal duets with the team leader, are noticeable. From the promises of Yankee-style action-thrillers, we move on to a boring and redundant chamber thriller, sometimes accompanied by comic scenes (this time intentional) that would relax the viewer but actually are only irritating. The "comedy" scene is entrusted to the character of Nick (played by Jakob Von Eichel), a half-mad person in detox treatment who serves as a comic foil to the boring Matthew (Henry Garrett), amnesic "visionary." Although "Visions" is ultimately a psychological thriller, the care with which all the characters are constructed and developed is extremely poor, ranging from the uselessness of characters like the journalist Hope (Caroline Kessler) to the true caricature of import like Nick, to the one-dimensionality of those who should have been seriously multifaceted, namely Matthew and Dr. Leemen (Steven Matthews). Against the development of the characters, one must certainly also blame the poor performance of almost the entire cast who, with the exception of Jakob Von Eichel who manages to hold his own against his caricature character, appear lackadaisical or particularly out of place, as well as questionable acting skills (Caroline Kessleeeeeeeeeer!). Much of the failure of this film must be attributed to the extreme improbability of many narrative solutions, which would certainly have succeeded if it were a parody but are entirely implausible in a product that takes itself seriously. The scene in which the journalist notices the "detail" in the scanned photo of the key found is an anthology of the absurd, as are some red herrings about the killer's identity that are entirely gratuitous, not to mention the final solution that, in addition to being essentially very predictable, resorts to devices worthy of "Scooby Doo" to make all the elements fit. But do we want to talk about the "explanation" at the end entrusted to a narrator's voice and of excessively annoying duration? Better not to insist, the flaws are really too numerous and macroscopic. So, what remains good in "Visions"? Nothing? Almost. The staging is very dignified, and Cecinelli has managed to handle the small budget available in an incredibly functional way (much of it goes to the concentration in indoor environments) adding also touches of quality like a good and dark photography (work of Claudio Zamarion) and some good sets (by Maurizio Marchitelli), in particular those concerning the scenes on Spider's locations. Interesting also is the staging of the "human installations" that the killer builds with his victims, pity that it is not almost ever focused on this aspect, limiting everything to a couple of sequences. Abundant the use of computer graphics special effects, by the leading company in Italy Proxima, sometimes even gratuitous (see the trap with explosion) and not always impeccable. This new foray into horror by Italy, therefore, really leaves much to be desired. Cecinelli directs a film without bite and particularly poorly written, that looks at modern American thriller and wastes every opportunity to be remembered over time.