MULTIPLEX

Niccolò, Viola, and four of their friends meet at the multiplex in their city to watch a horror movie. They immediately encounter the cinema guard, a strange individual who seems obsessed with order and discipline. There are also unsettling stories about people who have disappeared and were never found, so one of the boys suggests an idea to spend a different night: hiding in the theater after the screening to spend the night in the multiplex. And that's what happens, but when the cinema guard realizes their prank, instead of a night of fun, the six friends have a nightmare! Six twenty-year-old friends meet and go to the cinema. Four cross jokes just to tell us: 1) who is with whom among them; 2) that the cinema is cursed; 3) that the guy who cleans the toilets in the cinema has some screws loose. Then the film within the film begins, that is, the one the boys went to see in a modern multiplex outside the city, and we realize that the images scrolling on the screen are those of the very sculpted "Fatal Frames – Photograms of Death," the directorial debut of Al Festa, a delirious thriller from 1996. Probably, it is an honest declaration of intent the choice by director and screenwriter Stefano Calvagna to homage in his bad movie another equally bad genre movie, or at least we like to believe it because if you don't play the irony card, arriving mentally healthy to the end of the screening of "MultipleX" is really hard. The idea of making a thriller/horror set in a cinema comes to the director of "Il lupo" and "L'ultimo utras" directly from the UCI Cinemas chain, of which the multiscreen at Parco Leonardo in Rome Fiumicino, where the film is set and shot, is part. To carry out this task, Calvagna decides to draw inspiration from a true story he heard about a short time before from a chauffeur in New York, where the director was for the promotion of his previous film "Cronaca di un assurdo normale." It seems that in a cinema in the American state, a macabre story of madness unfolded, where a multiscreen guardian repeatedly spied on and threatened customers of the cinema who did not adhere to his absurd and rigorous rules, before being arrested and entrusted to medical care. Starting from this premise that could provide excellent suggestions, Calvagna writes a subject that instead tries to assign his film to the overused and worn-out teen-slasher genre. The cinema guardian, of course, here does not limit himself to spying and threatening, but kidnaps, tortures, and kills, just as must happen in this type of film; however, do not expect a show that focuses on sadism, violence, tension, morbidity, or whatever else you would expect from a film of this kind. "MultipleX" seems like a late '90s teen-slasher that came out directly on videocassette, as harmless as a ladybug and aimed more at action than at fatal knife stabs, all inexplicably left out of frame. But the problems of this film do not stop at the lack of originality, tension, and blood, but go to undermine practically every other element that builds its scaffolding and fills its structure. The fundamental flaw of "MultipleX" is the writing: there is practically no script or at least not a script that can be defined as such in a professional manner. The film follows a structure that mimics the classic cat-and-mouse game and completely leaves out any attempt to characterize the characters, delve into them, give them a background, and thus make the viewer at least a little attached to them. Rather, the young men and the killer who populate the film say and do stupid and senseless things, starting from the basic assumption of getting locked in a multiplex at night and spending time playing hide and seek. That is, getting locked in a cinema is not like getting locked in, say, a supermarket, where each of us at least once as a child has fantasized about being there at night to have fun with everything inside. In a cinema, at night, you can't even watch movies for free, so what do you do? And here comes the absurd intuition: play hide and seek, no! Six twenty-year-olds who decide to get locked in a cinema at night to play hide and seek. This detail alone in the plot makes us realize that "MultipleX" has serious problems right at its base, it lacks credibility, the foundations, and like every construction so fragile it takes little to collapse. So off with absurdly silly and unlikely dialogues ("From the jet of your pipe, I thought you were a male," says the guardian in a threatening tone to one of the protagonists who comes out of the bathroom) and unintentionally ridiculous scenes that do not even manage to make the film taken seriously, even for a moment, which instead does not want to be ironic. But then we realize that even the constantly grayish photography clashes, the music by Claudio Simonetti is anonymous, the pace is sustained but the narration is damn repetitive and cancels it out, and the actors are never really memorable. If, however, the girls Laura Adriani ("I Cesaroni"), Lavinia Guglielman ("Distretto di polizia"), and Giulia Morgani ("P.O.E. – Poetry of Eerie") save themselves by visibly trying, the others leave much to be desired, especially Federico Palmieri who plays a really unconvincing psychopath and not at all threatening. Even the final twist leaves much to be desired, opening further gaps in the screenplay rather than surprising. In short, "MultipleX" turns out to be really disappointing, an approximate product in every component that wants to be the "Demoni" of today but ends up resembling more "In the Market" by Lorenzo Lombardi than the beautiful film by Lamberto Bava.