Beautiful little nightmare of a movie

Rating: 8/10 (12 January 2004)

Gripping entry in the trapped-in-a-room horror subgenre that also includes classics like `Night of the Living Dead' and Carpenter's `The Thing.' It's not quite up to the standard of those two films--the script is in places talky or heavy-handed or cheesy, and two or three of the performers are unfortunately hammy. (Actually, in the case of Nicky Guadagni, replace the words `unfortunately hammy' with `unforgivably awful.') Still, the overall effect is very good, and the film (rather surprisingly) stands up well to repeat viewings, too. It's not so much that the paranoid premise is appealing (though it is), but rather that director Vincenzo Natali really seems to understand how to pace this peculiar drama of his. It's hard to imagine another film essentially set in a single room that manages to pull the rug out from us so often. From the prologue on, we are presented with shocks and twists that keep our allegiances shifting from character to character, and our rumps balanced uncomfortably on the edge of our seats. The design and lighting are more than striking, and if in the end things don't make a whole lot of sense, one gets the impression that that was never the director's aim in the first place. Instead, he seems to have set out simply to make a beautiful little nightmare of a movie, and at that he succeeded well. 8.5 out of 10.