night watchman Archives - Jeremy C. Processing

The Body
(2024)
(Il Corpo)

Director – Vincenzo Alfieri – 2024 – Italy – 115m

*****

The body of a rich industrialist’s wife vanishes from the morgue after her death – stylish giallo premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

An unashamed genre piece, The Body is a giallo – an Italian crime and murder mystery named after the yellow book covers of their literary equivalents. While it absolutely fits into that very specific Italian genre, it’s actually the fourth remake of Spanish murder mystery The Body (Oriol Paulo, 2012) following remakes in India (twice, as Game, A.M.R. Ramesh, 2016 and The Body, Jeethu Joseph, 2019) and South Korea (The Vanished, Lee Chang-hee, 2018).

The current version juxtaposes stock elements from gialli and popular fiction with some highly original ideas which may or may not have been used in the earlier versions as yet unseen by this writer. The stock elements include: the womaniser suspected of murdering his wife, the hard-bitten inspector investigating the case, the man who has married into wealth, and the university professor having an affair with a student. The highly original ideas: a man running out in front of a car, a corpse disappearing from a morgue, and a married woman who is also a practical joker.… Read the rest

The Fever
(A Febre)

Director – Maya Da-Rin – 2019 – Brazil – Cert. 12a – 98m

***1/2

An indigenous container port security man falls prey to a fever as a mysterious animal prowls the nearby Amazon rainforest – out in cinemas and on select online rental platforms including BFI Player and Curzon Home Cinema from Friday, July 30th

Justino (Regis Myrupu) works as the night watchman at a port in Manaus, a city on the edge of the Amazon rainforest, where huge containers are unloaded and loaded and stacked in perpendicular piles by huge mechanical rigs. At the lockers, he chats with a new colleague who used to supervise workers on a farm but got fed up with it.

After his shift, he takes the 324 bus then walks up the huge hill to his small shack where he lives with his grown up daughter Vanessa (Rosa Peixoto), his wife having died some years previously. Sometimes his son visits with or without daughter-in-law and child in tow. Sometimes his brother and wife visit.

There are news reports of a mysterious wild animal in the area attacking livestock. Sometimes, getting off the 324, Justino thinks her hears something in the undergrowth. But he finds nothing.… Read the rest