Pupi Avati
Il Nascondiglio

The Italian horror by Pupi Avati gained a legion of admirers thanks to two minor films in his otherwise extensive filmography, "La casa dalle finestre che ridono" (1976) and "Zeder" (1983), which, despite different nuances, told fundamentally similar stories: the loneliness of those who uncover mysteries destined to remain hidden, paying the price with pain and death. All this was portrayed in unconventional contexts for the cinema of the time, such as the beautiful countryside of Emilia-Romagna, with its dilapidated farmhouses bathed in full sun—gloomy at night—abandoned school colonies, beaches, and commuter trains on the Rimini-Bologna line.

The whole was unsettling and, quite notably, chills ran down the viewer's spine without too much bloodshed and through controlled spilling of blood: the horror was suggested and sealed by seemingly minor details, like the limp of a girl who had grown up, a telescope pointed at an abandoned house, a female voice and a bare breast that reveal themselves when you least expect it.

Avati's developments and successes, starting from the picturesque "Una gita scolastica" (1983), led our author far from the genre, except for a few forays in the subsequent "L'amico d'infanzia" (1994) and "L'arcano incantatore" (1996), which, however, could not revive the Bologna filmmaker as those films now forgotten by most.

In recent years, perhaps due to the DVD reissue, or the advent of the internet, "La casa..." and "Zeder" have achieved a cult status that possibly prompted the prolific Avati to retrace his old steps, rediscovering genre cinema and shooting this recent divertissement, "Il nascondiglio", which we will now analyze in detail.

Seemingly linear plot, in line with tradition: a woman with a dark past, Italian in a foreign land (agricultural Iowa), leaves the asylum after fifteen years of commitment and decides to open a restaurant in an old abandoned house, municipally owned; having arrived there thanks to the directions of a somewhat shoddy real estate agent, she begins to sense dark presences, which manifest with moans and murmurs of obscure origin, tremors, disappearances, and appearances of objects. Is it just imagination? A return of the madness thought abandoned? The impossibility of relating to reality? To unravel the mystery, little will be the help of the locals, who are aware of secrets better left unrevealed, under penalty of pain and death, as already in "La casa..." and "Zeder".

I will say right away that I liked this film, even compared to the latest and disappointing "La terza madre" by Argento, which aged much worse than Avati: although the staging doesn't surprise too much, and cliched elements abound in our cinema, as well as easy concessions to genre cinema, "Il nascondiglio" is not only well acted by a Laura Morante in full form (who in fact carries ¾ of the film by herself), but it also raises subtle and domestic anxieties in the viewer, uncovering fears never dormant, such as that of hearing voices, sounds, and unexpected noises. All with simplicity, but with that simplicity that truly scares, precisely because it recalls everyday situations, destined to be relived by each viewer in the most disparate contexts, not only and certainly not in a haunted house like "Amityville Horror" or "Psycho" (to which this film owes something). Few are the scenes of true suspense, and few are the chances of jumping in the cinema seat as many horror thrillers of today demand (starting from the archetype "Le verità nascoste" by Zemeckis, to which this film owes something too), but tension is well diluted over the entire hour and a half of the work, with the usual final escalation of violence where everything seems to melt into the most genuine terror.

Two critical notes on the side: the film has an ambiguous character, with an even more pronounced convergence of rational and irrational compared to Avati's previous works; it is therefore not easy to understand where the protagonist's madness ends and that of the external and real world begins; secondly, it is curious to note how in Avati's Catholic cinema there is, ultimately, no possibility of salvation, but only despair, loneliness, and emptiness.

A thoroughly pessimistic message, which we do not find, for instance, in Argento, where the deus ex machina (also metaphorical/religious) always gets the protagonist out of trouble, perhaps in the form of Dio(mede) as in "Quattro mosche...", of an elevator as in "Profondo Rosso", of a sculpture as in "Tenebre", or even of a monkey as in "Phenomena". While in Argento terror is healed, and madness is confined within the cinema, in Avati there is no reconciliation, almost as if terror merely photographs reality, representing it without betraying it.