Claudia rents out the upper floor of an isolated house during a trip to a seemingly abandoned part of Europe. It’s all being done as a means to confront her insecurities and strengthen her resolve into doing what’s best for her instead of pleasing the people around her. She befriends the charmingly eccentric (ok, sometimes creepy) owner of the place, Letizia, who introduces her to the practice of metafonia which is a fancy-ass Italian way of saying EVP and not the phonological process used in the romance languages… and here I thought my phonology course in college would never be useful. Letizia has a modified radio setup in her bedroom and she claims it’s a means of communicating with those who have passed on from this living realm, Claudia is doubtful at first and thinks it may just be the desperation of a lonely older woman at play but when you fiddle around with the supernatural it almost always fiddles back. Claudia seems to contact her recently departed grandma and gets a little spooked. Things get worse as her stay grows disquieting and she’s visited by strange dreams of exploring liminal spaces in lo-fi video POV that also kind of looks like a PlayStation cutscene with tracking issues and disturbing audio. There’s also something sinister waiting at the end of things. It oddly works. Leti has some secrets of her own and her cozy old house has a few terrifying stories to tell. Maybe communing with the dead ain’t such a great idea especially if on the other end of the line is something more than human, or less depending on your definition. Successfully nailing the visuals of the gothic horror that put its home country on the radar of genre fans, the emulation of the aura that came before fits well in the modern context of a stranger wading through unfamiliar waters. Vast emptiness and fog shrouded environments do well to paint our sympathetic hero as a visitor in a land that very few people would ever be prepared for and the dimly lit and narrow interiors mesmerize with a cramped antiquity. It then shifts into a more contemporary slice of the macabre madness as it reveals what it’s conjuring. Purposely paced and set to a very low boil, the film relies on solid atmosphere and performances combined with some intriguing visuals and plot points. It falters slightly in execution and kind of gets lost in its own weirdo narrative but it’s still refreshingly strange, impressively realized and not at all what I was expecting.
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