- AKA “The Room”
- Directed by Stefano Lodovichi
- Written by Stefano Lodovichi, Francesco Agostini, Filippo Gili
- Stars Guido Caprino, Camilla Filippi, Edoardo Pesce
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 41 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrJFkqeC_nQ
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
You will probably have theories watching this one, trying to figure out what is really going on. You probably won’t be correct. This one is really well acted, well produced, and has a very cool story with an intriguing wrap up.
Synopsis
We see a woman in her wedding dress, crying in the rain. She’s ready to jump out a high window of her building to kill herself when the bell rings and snaps her out of it. Someone’s at the door. She’s dripping wet and a real mess, but she answers the door. He’s Guilio, he says he booked a room with Stella. She says they haven’t rented in a long time. The website will refund him. He really has no place else to go, and he’s persistent. He’s been out of the country for a while and is just returning. He says Stella’s husband Sandro will be coming by to say hello, and she perks right up. Credits roll.
She lets him in and shows him the bedroom. She looks at her suicide note, closes the window, and puts on normal clothes. Sandro used to like to meet new people, and Stella doesn’t, so when he left, she stopped renting the room.
Guilio finds a pair of Stella’s underwear in his room, and he eagerly starts sniffing them. He then notices holes in the wall and peeks through. Whatever he sees makes him angry. He puts on Stella’s husband’s clothes and fixes himself some lunch, even after Stella said no. Stella mentions that her son lives with Sandro and won’t be joining them for breakfast. They finally talk; Guilio had been in Japan, but came back to visit his dead parents.
Guilio is very pushy about what he wants, and Stella is grumpy, but goes along with most of it; she doesn’t care enough to argue.
Sandro comes to the door; he’s come because of her suicide text messages. Sandro doesn’t know anything about Guilio. “Did you get a reservation number?” He stopped advertising the room months ago. Sandro says he doesn’t have their son; what happened to him?
Guilio then whacks Sandro over the head and chokes out Stella. When they wake up, they’re zip-tied to chairs. Guilio shows Stella a photo with Sandro, another woman, and a child. Sandro’s got the same photo in his wallet. All these years, he’s had another whole family out there. Guilio goes upstairs to a closed door and talks to the person inside. “I brought you your yogurt.” It’s Stella’s son. Although we don’t see him, there’s obviously something weird going on. That’s who Guilio saw through the peephole in his room.
Guilio smacks Sandro repeatedly about avoiding the son upstairs for the new one. Sandro tells his side of the story; they were happy together until the baby came, and then things went badly. He actually hoped that Stella would kill herself. Sandro says it was all Stella’s idea to keep their child locked up upstairs. Sandro breaks loose from the chair, knocks out Guilio, but still can’t get out of the house; the doors are screwed shut.
Stella is still tied up as Sandro looks for a way out. Guilio takes his shirt off, and we see that he’s all scarred up on his arms. He has her suicide note, but it looks really old. Guilio asks what her son’s name is. It’s Guilio. Yes, this is the same Guilio, but he’s obviously not ten years old. “I am dead, right?” she asks. He smiles and walks away.
Guilio goes upstairs to find Sandro ready to jump out the same window Stella was going to jump out of earlier. Guilio says Sandro used to abuse him, but Sandro says he never hit his son. Stella breaks free and hears Guilio upstairs torturing Sandro. “This time thing is a mess,” says Guilio. We see a video that in the future, Guilio has murdered both Alex and Linda, the other woman and hus other son. “Here’s the nice part; when he dies, I’ll disappear too.” He’s come back in time because Stella killed herself over Sandro’s lies, and adult time-traveling Guilio wants to fix things.
Guilio tells Sandro that if Sandro kills himself now, in the future, Linda and Alex won’t die. Sandro slits his wrist, but it’s not enough to kill him, so Guilio puts a bag over his head and sucks all the air out. Stella watches all this in shock but doesn’t try to stop any of it. Guilio wants to know why Stella never hugged him or told him that she loved him. He says goodbye and waits to disappear.
He doesn’t disappear. He was supposed to vanish with Sandro’s death. Stella doubts that she’s his mother. Guilio tells her about his past and his hard life. He convinced himself that it was all Sandro’s fault. “But I was wrong. It wasn’t his fault.” No, he decides that Stella was guiltier than Sandro ever was.
Stella goes to little Guilio’s bedroom to hide with the boy. Trapped in there, with adult Guilio breaking down the door, she apologizes to the little boy and tells him that she loves him. They hug, and the screaming at the door stops.
The two go downstairs, and Stella throws away both the new and the old suicide notes. She gives him some yogurt.
Commentary
We both had multiple theories about what was going on, and they repeatedly got smashed down as the story continued to evolve. It’s very “twisty” and unpredictable in that once you think you know what’s going on, things change. A couple of times, characters mention that Stella “killed herself” in the past tense, and we weren’t quite sure if that was a clue or a translation mistake. Turns out, it was accurate, just not in the way we were expecting.
I liked this. The performances were good, the set was excellent, and the best part is we didn’t see what was coming until the very end. Nice!