Orfeo, the debut feature by Italian director Virgilio Villoresi, presented in world premiere out of competition at the Venice Film Festival, offers a baroque, sensual and venomous portrait of a loving bond that delves into darkness. Made with great attention to detail, Villoresi’s film must be savoured frame by frame, without haste, like a liquor that burns the throat but warms the heart.

Based on Dino Buzzati’s Poema a fumetti, considered to be the first Italian graphic novel, the film depicts the adventures of a modern Orpheus (Luca Vergoni), in love almost to the point of madness with the mysterious Eura (or Euridice) (played by Giulia Menza). Orfeo is a voluptuously composed film in which animation marries fiction, reality marries dreams, and poetry marries mysticism. A decidedly original work of art that recalls the decadent opulence of Dario Argento but also the esoterism of Maya Deren or Kenneth Anger, Orfeo delves into the heart of cinema, where nothing is what it seems and all can turn into its opposite.

The characters in Orfeo become metaphors for a range of deep human feelings, from desire to love, as well as fear of death and the search for meaning in a life that no longer has any. The tension between reality and fiction is palpable and the audience is driven, like a sleepwalker, to embark on a sensory journey that frightens and fascinates. For in order to appreciate Villoresi’s film, it is necessary to abandon oneself to the unknown, to let oneself be lulled by images to which it isn’t always necessary to ascribe a meaning. Like in a secret ritual whose rules are unknown, the audience is pushed to experience the magic of early cinema, to taste the beauty of images as if it were a visit in an imaginary museum.

The characters, whether human or supernatural figures, become essential elements within a narrative structure that is more symbolic than rational, more like a dream (or a nightmare) with eyes open than a logical and realistic tale. These same characters meet, leave and brush against each other in a parallel world in equilibrium between desire and desillusion, loss and hope. The figure of the ballerina is particularly interesting, a kind of embodiment of contrasting sentiments that range from grace to cruelty, elegance to monstrosity. Dance, the choreographies that the characters use as a means of expression for their own simmering interior world, transform into messages from an afterlife that remains hidden behind a thick curtain. Demons, skeletons and mysterious horned characters are part of this suspended world, as if to remind us that Orfeo’s search won’t be simple and that on his path, he will have to face his own dark side, which is, on closer inspection, that of humanity itself. “Isn’t life terrifying?” says one of the characters, reminding us that danger can hide behind beauty, and that behind the seeming tranquility of everyday life, the instability of an existence that can change faces at any moment lies.

Imbued with profound melancholy but also poisonous charm, Orfeo is a journey at once real and interior that the audience undertakes with the guidance of Orfeo’s gaze. The boundaries between dream, reality, life and death are crossed thanks to the magic of cinema, a means with which to give shape to interior worlds that would otherwise remain locked up in the mind of who created them.

Orfeo was produced by Fantasmagoria and is sold internationally by True Colours.