When you are in front of a short film called ‘Bahamas‘, more than likely, your imagination takes you on an exotic adventure, away from the routine and noises of everyday life. In fact, this is exactly the pretext that directors Fabio Orefice and Rodolfo “Belusci” Croce take advantage of to hit you with a totally unpredictable experience. The spectator is thus thrown not into a paradisiacal space but right into the middle of emotional hell, a hostile and cloistering mental universe that, like in an against time thriller, gradually reveals a monstrous disclosure. Being familiar with the style imposed by the films that explore the convulsive states of the characters in extreme situations, the directors avoid the scheme of a concrete narrative to insist on the psychological tension of a man facing an overwhelming event. The experimental nuances that derive from this attitude translate into a seemingly chaotic editing, defined by spatial and temporal ruptures, agitated movements of the camera, images in chiaroscuro or shrill sounds that induce the nausea and the mental distress of the protagonist. From this point of view, the short film is less of a story and more of a hectic sensory experience, a cinematic vertigo in which words and shrills viscerally strike the viewer.
Starting from a moment of anxiety felt by a man before flying with his partner to the vacation of their dreams, the short film suddenly shifts into nightmarish grief. Is all this real or not? – it’s hard to say. But precisely this indeterminacy through which Fabio Orefice and Rodolfo “Belusci” Croce play with the expectations of the viewers further enhances the impact of the project. We are immersed in a twilight spider web of close-ups and details of a gloomy poeticism in which the tension increases insidiously and convincingly, far from the clichés of the jump-scares we have become accustomed to. All we hope is that ‘Bahamas’ will be just the beginning, if not of a feature film, then of a long-lived directorial partnership that has already convinced us through the professionalism of their work.
For the elaborate cinematic construction that captures the viewer in an almost claustrophobic visceral experience, ‘Bahamas’ was awarded the 2nd Film of the Month distinction in the January 2022 edition of TMFF.
Share:
