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
