Monelle

Young girls lie asleep in the Casa del Fascio by Italian rationalist architect Giuseppe Terragni, near Como, an important example of 1930s Fascist architecture. A flash illuminates the surrounding space: images appear, the darkness falls again. Disturbing animated CGI figures surround the girls: presences engaged in mysterious activities, visible only when their images are revealed by the flash. Long darknesses are filled with mysterious sounds: heavy steps, bodies dragged along the ground, dull thuds, echoes booming in halls and corridors. Diego Marcon’s new work is a hybrid of structural film and horror, a work that circumscribes a place of ambiguity, promiscuity and pure terror, taking advantage of the place’s alienating modernist aesthetic, and the contrast between 35mm and digital animation formats. The film’s repetitive structure creates a constantly disappointed sense of expectation, in an atmosphere suspended between alertness and a deliberately unexpressed narrative potential.