Aspromonte, a mountain range in southern Calabria, is a contorted, lush, green tract of land in Southern Italy, in which small towns are embedded like sharp teeth into the harsh, rocky terrain. Here, clerical faith runs high, and the eerie mystery of the forest evokes something wild, ancient, from which one must be protected. The region is at the centre of Isabella Torre’s feature debut, Basileia [+lire aussi :
interview : Isabella Torre
fiche film], which screened in the Giornate degli Autori section of the 81st Venice Film Festival.

A stranger, whom everyone is calling “Irishman” (Elliott Crosset Hove), is roaming the lands, scribbling away in his notebook. With his rudimentary Italian and his quest to unearth the hidden treasure of a long-gone civilisation, he might immediately bring to mind Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
fiche film]. But Torre is creating a darker beast, one that is not built on lost love and longing, but rather on the fragile balance between the human world and the realms of nature. When an illegal dig with his accomplices goes awry as the police turn up, Irishman ends up as a patient in a nun’s convent. There, his employer takes his precious notebook: they are done with digging, he proclaims.

But Irishman feels that he is close to an artefact that might have a spiritual aura and therefore could bring in a lot of money. Whether it’s his archaeological passion, his lust for cash or any other intrinsic motivation remains a mystery. Torre does not give her characters a lot of backstory, but only adds to the mystery when Irishman, who claims to be Scottish, suddenly speaks Danish on a secret phone call in the convent. He is close, is the message. The one thing one might acknowledge is that, after Godland [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
interview : Elliott Crosset Hove
interview : Hlynur Pálmason
fiche film] and now Basileia, Danish actor Crosset Hove must have developed a certain taste for dark, crushing nature dramas.

He encounters Keykey (Koudous Seihon), an immigrant whom he recruits to help him dig for the artefact. And sure enough, they do find a mysterious chest. But this disturbance of its resting place leads to the awakening of a group of nymphs (all Angela Fontana), who set out to restore the disrupted balance. While Irishman keeps worrying about the treasure and his income, the tight-knit local community almost reacts with unimpressed calmness when people start disappearing.

While the movie starts off promisingly, the second half, as the nymphs set out for vengeance, cannot maintain the tension. Teetering somewhere between uncanny fantasy, ecological thriller and horror, the movie aims for too much and mostly gives too little. While the look and the set design are well crafted, one simply does not connect with the characters enough to feel their fate on a deeper level. There is the beauty of Aspromonte to marvel at, yet it feels like this particular aspect has been mastered before, with more finesse in the storytelling.

Basileia was produced by Italy’s Stayblack Productions and RAI Cinema in co-production with Denmark’s Snowglobe and Sweden’s Film i Väst. It is sold internationally by Luxbox.