Il buco (2021, Michelangelo Frammartino) (Patreon)

57/100

Gotta respect the purity—unsubtitled dialogue, anonymous non-characters, negligible context—and yet it’s still not rigorous enough for my taste. I’d have much preferred that the film remain underground for most of its duration, just letting the spelunkers’ headlamps carve ever-shifting sculptures out of the darkness; watching abstract art inadvertently created by ordinary movement through space, the contours of which lurch in and out of our limited field of vision, is never less than dazzling. Ditto the perplexing scale, which at one point saw me mistake a small flame viewed in close-up for a sizable fire off in the distance. (There was no distance; my brain invented it.) Even views of the village lighthouse from wildly varying perspectives (it’s barely a pinprick in one shot) serve as subtle foreshadowing. If only Frammartino hadn’t felt compelled to clonk us upside the head by cross-cutting this singularly tenebrous expedition with an elderly cowherd’s* lonely journey to the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns. I don’t at all begrudge Il buco taking its time at the outset—contrasting Calabria’s placid pace with the visitors’ hustle and bustle (generally viewed at an entomological distance, their chatter pointedly left untranslated), while also reminding us that few sounds are more deeply soothing than cowbells—but maintaining that schism throughout makes it feel reductive, and every single cut back to the surface breaks what had been a magnificent spell. During one progress report on the cowherd’s slow progress toward Styx’s ferry, I found myself wondering whether the film’s title signifies not just a physical hole in the earth but the unfillable hole left by any organism’s death, a thought so pretentious that I resented the movie for inspiring it. Basically, I wanted The Descent minus monsters, and Frammartino’s goals are consistently loftier than that. As for the final shot that enthralled many of my peers, I quote that dude in Sátántangó: “You’ve never seen fog before or what?”

* No sheep, no shepherd, I maintain, with the same quixotic insistence applied to every repulsive “woah” I encounter.