Dove comincia la notte

A handsome young man, Irving, returns to his home-town, Davenport, Iowa. And soon he finds something bad happened in the old house where he meets a beautiful girl, Sybil, and something worse is happening in the same house... Although this film itself is not bad at all, it unexpectedly disappoints me to a certain degree only because it is not a typical Giallo at all. Its atmosphere is definitely the 1970s' Gialli but it has no Argento-like cinema-graphic technique, no graphic violence, and no female nudity. Regarding the second, this film is highly suggestive and one can naturally understand there is some kind of violence but cannot see it. And more, although this film has no first person narrator, everything there is seen and heard by one person, Irving. And therefore the entire story depends upon his visual and auditory perceptabilities so that everything depends upon whether one can trust those or not. In this sense, the world of this film is not essentially of Giallo but simply of PSYCHO. Still, as I already mentioned, the film itself is not bad at all. The delicate hero, Irving, has to know not only the unknown past but also the more unknown ongoing present. But why? Pupi Avati's story-and-screenplay is much better than I expected to be. Also the director, Maurizio Zaccaro, trustworthily knows how to cinema-graphically use glass and mirror and how to sharpen the only one bloody scene the film has. And Kim Mai Guest, who plays one of the heroines, Sybil, is noteworthily attractive. Strangely enough, Guest in this film is highly resembles Juliette Lewis in her late teens, not only in their outer appearances but also in their ways of acting. Unfortunately one can see Guest but cannot hear her because her English is dubbed in Italian. (Incidentally, her stand-in is Ilaria Stagni.) But above all, legendary composer Stefano Caprioli does excellent jobs here again. I believe the most impressive element of this film is nothing but the theme song, IRVING SONG, which is sung by Susan Zelouf. It is so impressively beautiful that I cannot even think about this film without it. In addition, although none of my Iowan friends sees, or even knows, this Italian film, its main filming location is Davenport,IA itself, not the usual Rome or something like that. One can see, for instance, the Davenport Public Library as one of the key places of the film.

Those who expect this Italian horror/thriller to be in the tradition of the late great Lucio Fulci's gorefests and only accept Italian horror cinema like this will surely be disappointed by this extremely subtle film. There is not one single gore effect in the whole movie - but it doesn't need any. This film tells the story about a young man who returns to the house where he grew up - just after the death of his father, whose reputation got destroyed by the suicide of a young woman he had an affair with. The young man soon gets obsessed by the house and the past of his dad... "Dove Comincia la Notte" is a film in the tradition of overtly subtle horror films like the beautiful "Un Sussurro nel Buio" from 1976, where no manifestation of the supernatural ever happens, yet the main characters are so haunted by a past event that they won't be able to escape in the end. An uncanny film, even though sometimes almost too subtle: 7 out of 10.