Silvano Agosti
Nel Più Alto Dei Cieli

Elevators are a terrible thing; especially when you get stuck inside them. It happened to me when I was little; the elevator in question, unlike the one that serves as the set in the film, was human-sized, and unlike the characters in "Nel più alto dei cieli," I was alone. Needless to say, I was immediately overcome with fear, or perhaps more than fear, with anguish, which, unlike the former, recognized in that experience something more than a simple incident that in almost all cases remains just a fright, or at most in a forced exercise of taking the stairs every time in cases of phobia.

I won't say whether I survived such a circumstance just to create suspense... Instead, I will say right away that the film's characters magically survive the ordeal: a necessary spoiler to well frame the underlying message of the tragedy depicted by the film, and in the way that I believe the director intended. He, in fact, thought it wise to bring together in a large elevator, almost an apartment, the discrepancies that afflict humanity, represented by some of the characters (a socialist and a politician); along with innocence/chastity shattered (the child and the priest), to which other characters are added, including a priest and a nun (fascinating). In quite a clever way, he then scatters hints of the supernatural, stemming from the fact that the elevator in question is located in the Vatican; with a skewed floor numbering; hinting, through the voice of one of the characters, at the possibility of being spied upon, or that one of them has orchestrated the prank; and especially the transitions in the soundtrack from classical music to strange sounds, more related to science fiction, coinciding with tearing the covering from the floor of the elevator, now stationary for some time and isolated from the world, revealing a strange circular fan. These devices aim to create a rupture from rationality. The reason is that, as reported in the initial caption, the film is not an attack on faith or religion; rather, it's merely a critique of it.

Even though amidst all the miasma of immodesty and violence generated by the spiral of anguish and realization of being trapped, it will be a monk who is the first to give in to the allure of the flesh, to the point of abusing the child in the midst of the general collusive half-sleep, this more than a dissenting stance towards faith, gives more the idea (extremized, of course) of the nonetheless existing pairing between sexuality and religion, or still expresses a critique of asceticism or orthodoxy in general that would want love towards God as exclusive. However, the same discourse does not seem possible regarding the orgiastic/violent drift that will gradually lead to homicidal delirium, with some even more outlandish hints at witchcraft; such a degeneration that rather significantly penalizes the artistic credibility of the work - not because it depicts sexual or violent situations, but because the situation itself, although terrible, does not seem to justify the use of such components, and especially not on the level of the overall dynamics of a group, even a large one, of people not mentally ill.

As a result, it does not earn a passing grade in my opinion.