The House with Laughing Windows

A young restorer comes to a small village in the Po valley to work on a fresco in the church. It shows the killing of Saint Sebastian and the painter is said to have made it while watching a real death. He killed himself years ago. As the restorer works, the one person in the village who will talk to him also disappears. The subject is not horror but a village quietly maintaining a shared secret. Nobody lies; nobody tells. The dread comes not from a creature but from the thing everybody knows and nobody says. The form is slow and daylit. Most of it takes place in the open: fields, the riverbank, the empty church. Music is used sparingly and the tension comes out of silence. This is a route entirely apart from the bright, showy manner of Italian horror at the time. It is Pupi Avati's film, shot in his own region, the countryside of Emilia-Romagna. Avati said the source lay in local stories he heard as a child, and much of its credibility comes from that local texture. Lino Capolicchio plays the restorer and Francesca Marciano the schoolteacher. Who it is for: viewers who like slowly built horror and Italian rural thrillers. Who it is not for: anyone expecting pace; the film does almost nothing for a long stretch and saves its effect for the end.