SURROUNDED

Carl and Maryann are a young couple. He is a successful lawyer and has to be away for an entire day for work, while she is a pregnant teacher of two months. They live in an isolated villa, surrounded by the countryside, and strange things start to happen: first, a man knocks on the door claiming his dog, then strange noises alarm the woman, making her fear that someone has entered the house. Under the label "Gabriele Albanesi Produzioni", since the director of "Il bosco fuori" is here as a producer, arrives in Italian cinemas, distributed by Explorer Entertainment, "Surrounded – Circondata", an Italian thriller but with an international flavor, which has been sold on digital download platforms in 67 countries. As it used to happen in Italy, when horror films were produced for the international market, the shortest and safest way to create an appealing product for the widest possible audience was to build a film on an already successful storyline. And so, since home invasions are quite popular right now and with "You're Next", "The Purge", and "Dark Skies" bringing plenty of chills and entertainment in recent months, there is also room for the tricolor home invasion. With "Surrounded", however, we are more on the side of "Them" and "The Strangers", where action and blood give way to slow rhythms and mystery. However, "Surrounded" does not fully achieve the set goals, and the attempts to build tension, which are clearly the film's primary element, succeed one out of three times. First of all, the screenplay by debutants Laura Girolami and Federico Patrizi, who, in addition to writing, also direct the film, takes too long to get to the heart of the matter, and out of a total duration of 84 minutes, the first signs of danger occur around the fiftieth minute. Before that, if we exclude the intrusion of the guy looking for his dog, nothing really happens, and no clues of that imminent danger are given, which the viewer knows exists and will eventually show up. The additional problem is that tension and suspense are not managed well, and the film never manages to scare or be unsettling, ultimately ending up boring. Despite the fact that there is intentionally no blood or violence and that the attempts to create tension do not work too well, "Surrounded" can be considered successful in its final twist. Although not too unexpected, the film's solution arrives effectively, and the face-off of the protagonist with the threat that haunts her, in the final scenes, leaves that sense of satisfaction of the finding that hit the mark. In terms of acting, Daniel Baldock ("Letters to Juliet", "Bloody Sin"), who plays Carl and is only seen in the prologue, leaves something to be desired, but the protagonist Tatiana Luter, whom we have recently seen in "L'ultima ruota del carro" and "Bologna 2 Agosto: I giorni della collera", is really good and carries the entire film on her shoulders. Technically sound, thanks mainly to a photography that enhances the aseptic whites of the villa's interiors and the darks of the numerous poorly lit scenes, "Surrounded" benefits from a meticulous direction that seems very attentive to camera movements close to a certain elegant Argento-like virtuosity... and it is not difficult to recognize in the scene where Maryann screams by pounding her fists against the French window a reference to "Profondo Rosso", just as the tracking shot in a long take that goes from the bedroom to the bathroom and then back is typical of certain aspirations of the director of "Tenebre". Despite relying on a certain technical refinement and benefiting from a protagonist who leaves a mark, "Surrounded" does not fully convince due to somewhat superficial writing, lacking tension, and poorly calibrated management of timing and pacing.