The other italian horror film to debut in theathers here (the other being The Nameless Ballad), Ferine, which goes in an interesting direction, even if it tackles a common theme for horror, especially modern horror, as in: maternity.

Irene is a rich fine art collector that, after picking up her baby from her surrogate mother, suffers a street accident due to a loose panther (which was being shipped to a rich huntress), losing even the child, and afterwards she start to become more feral, regressing to a mostly mute animal, rejecting any food that isn’t raw meat, while the surrogate mother and the huntress are forced to eventually intervene since Irene was never gonna make the incident or the surrogate baby public…

It’s actually quite interesting, as there is the influence of the old Italian horror classics, but also a bit of Raw, there’s the ambition of the “elevated horror” but also a strong identity of its own, a confidence in its own vision, as it curiously opts to imply more than show the gore and blood, to focus on Irene psychological regression into a feral, like a modern take on Cat People, thanks to Bracken’s very good performance as Irene.

The main issues lay in how the script does ultimately not properly depict Irene as a character proper, and the final act, instead of escalating to its extremes the themes… it just kinda potters about to restate stuff already more than established, almost as if we needed to put it genre clichès leading to a more stock resolution to pad the runtime.

It’s a shame, because it’s a very good debut film for Andrea Corsini, a flawed one that mostly tumbles towards the end due to the script, but regardless i do wanna see what he cooks up next.