Written by Linda
March 07, 2009
While not a bad movie, the Italian film I'm Not Scared is one of those flicks where you get a slight nagging feeling that if it had been done in English it would be betrayed as a rather typical thriller. It just seems better because it has subtitles.
The setting of the film is rather uniquely fantastic in the most sparse-and-forgotten-landscape kind-of-way. It is countryside Italy in the 1970s, where rolling hills of wheat make the horizon looks like endless Sahara dunes if you squint your eyes a certain way. In an ultra-remote village in the midst of all this farmland, the children play while the adults seem to do... nothing. Watch the wheat grow, I guess.
After the pack of kids leave an abandoned house they've discovered for an afternoon of frollicking and dares, 10-year-old Michele (the darkly brooding Giuseppe Cristiano) stays behind to search for his sister's dropped glasses. Not only does he find the glasses, but he also discovers a hastily covered-over hole with... is that a body down there?!?!
Like all sane people, Michele runs for dear life, but his curiosity drives him back. The body is actually a live boy, chained in the mud, eyes swollen shut from the darkness. Michele sneaks back, giving the boy food, but in his 10-year-old mind, is too paralyzed to help the kid further, especially after he eavesdrops on the village's adults having a heated argument about a story on the national news....
I'm Not Scared starts out well. I didn't know where the film was going for the first half or so, as it mixed in drama, horror, and coming-of-age awareness with a political thriller backdrop. But as it neared its conclusion, it is like the story chickened out and tacked on a Hollywood ending.
Cristiano, who plays Michele, carries the movie quite ably for a kid, but ironically is it the Hole Boy, Mattia Di Pierro, who pulls his scenes down with Bad Child Acting. It is bad to not have much pity for the central victim of a film. It is even worse to kind of wish that they'd keep him in his hole and leave him there.
Ultimately, the tone the movie set for itself promised something much darker, so in the end I was left just shrugging my shoulders at the conclusion. It is too bad, because otherwise I'm Not Scared was a promising nail-biter.
