The Double Hour
With this tasty genre piece, first-time director Giuseppe Capotondi proves there is life in Italian cinema beyond ponderous glossy dramas and pneumatic sex comedies. Mixing film noir, thriller, love story and supernatural horror, The Double Hour has some of the dour provincial atmosphere and subtly menacing tone of 2007 Italo murder mystery The Girl by the Lake; but it’s more intricately plotted, and takes us into much more intriguing dream-and-reality territory.
The widowed Guido and the lonely Sonia have just begun to connect when he is murdered in front of her during a break-in at the villa where he works as a security guard – and she finds herself mourning a lover she hardly knew. Soon [...] she begins to see, or perhaps imagine, Guido’s ghost.
Spin this story out over an hour and a half and you would have a fairly standard European arthouse number. But that synopsis barely accounts for the first thirty minutes – and it’s what happens in the rest of the film (impossible to reveal without spoilers) that turns The Double Hour into a real word-of-mouth, talking-point title, which will appeal especially to connoisseurs of clever mystery scripts.
– Lee Marshall, Screen Daily
Original name:La Doppia Ora
Duration: 95 min
Dialogue: Spanish, Italian
Subtitles: English
Age limit: K15
