A Magnificent Haunting

One of Ferzan Özpetek's Rome films, this time working with ghosts. Pietro is a young pastry chef from Catania who moves to Rome to become an actor and finds a flat at via Cavalcanti 37 in the Monteverde district. The flat is occupied. Its residents were members of a theatre company who vanished during the Second World War. The film runs on that double situation: the ghosts refuse to accept that they died and still live inside their company, while Pietro, trying to work out why they are stuck, realises his own life has stopped somewhere too. As in every Özpetek film the subject is the past, but here the past is literally sitting in the living room. Elio Germano plays Pietro, with Margherita Buy, Vittoria Puccini, Giuseppe Fiorello and Anna Proclemer. In 2012 it won two Nastro d'Argento awards, two Ciak d'Oro and five Globo d'Oro, with eight David di Donatello nominations. Who it is for: viewers who like Italian cinema that turns a ghost story into sadness and comedy rather than fear. Who it is not for: anyone expecting horror. There is no dread here; the tone is light and some sections run long.