‘The Eve’ is not another story of a boy’s adventure with Santa Claus, or to better put it, ‘The Eve’ is a very different story about a boy’s adventure with Santa Claus. Luca Machnich’s film is one of the most original horror films in our festival and one of the most interesting experimental films at the same time.
A semi-sociopath but intelligent boy’s only dream is to runaway with Santa Claus into the fairytale world at the Pole, far away from adults and society. His fervid imagination facilitates strange and quite sinister scenarios about things order. However, the most sinister thing will not be the boy’s sociopathic issues and his family’s efforts to deal with them but the personality and the hidden secrets beyond Santa that his father hires to meet the boy on Eve’s Night.
The film starts with a warning that colours in some parts of the film are based on Max Luscher’s psychological meaning of colours. So we’ve studied the issue and decided to give it a try for a version of interpretation; we’ve discovered traces of grey, violet, red and some yellow: concealment, wishful unrealistic fulfilment, desire and expectancy.
So the colours divide between the boy’s wishful unrealistic fulfilment and expectancy, the parents’ concealment of the boy’s true origins and the violent and full of desire nature of the Santa. The world in ‘The Eve’ becomes one of many unrealistic expectations generated by a possible deep emotional trauma rooting in a concealed truth; expectations that will be shocked and shattered by an aggressive desire that will either worsen the trauma or help it find new ways of expression and accomplishment. Truly terrifying, intelligent, intellectual, psychological and symbolic.
‘The Eve’ is an outstanding experimental horror film from a director that knows what he’s doing and knows how to deliver mind shivers. A must see not only for horror and experimental fans but for any person who likes to consider himself a film-fan.
TMFF RATING:
