The End? (FrightFest 2017)
Gareth Jones
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Starring Alessandro Roja, Carolina Crescentini, Claudio Camilli, Euridice Axén
Directed by Daniele Misischia
Claudio Verona (Roja) is an asshole.
A high-flying businessman, he’s disrespectful, terse, demanding, and just an outright cretin to anyone he perceives to be below his station. As Daniele Misischia’s The End? opens, Claudio is berating his driver for making him late for an important meeting, and instructs him to turn off the radio – on which the news is reporting outbreaks of random, but severe, violence amongst Rome’s population.
Once he reaches the office, Claudio pursues co-worker Marta (Axén) into the elevator. Marta being Claudio’s ex-mistress, it seems he considers himself entitled to her body – getting handsy and vulgar until Marta ‘treats’ him to a much-needed testicle crushing. After Marta departs, Claudio finds himself trapped between floors when the elevator malfunctions. While he waits for the repair crew to fix the situation, Claudio inadvertently finds himself in the safest place in the entire building as zombies begin to run amok.
And so begins Claudio’s introspective journey into becoming a better person. As he tries to free himself from his tiny prison, he encounters both the infected (who can’t manage to squeeze through the doors to get to him) and non-infected co-workers – most of whom show up for a minute or two before meeting their own end at the hands of the rampaging horde.
This kind of single-location character setup is one we’ve seen many times before, and to varying degrees of success. The End? falls somewhere in the middle of the scale. Whilst Claudio is one of the most unlikeable protagonists to ever hit the screen in such a film (kudos to lead Alessandro Roja for a fantastic performance), he does get moments of redemption and nuance – see, for example, the revelation of just how much he really does love his wife. His devastation when a phone call with her appears to end in her demise is genuinely moving, even in the face of his earlier behaviour.
Where a film such as this lives or dies is in its ability to sustain interest throughout a feature length, and The End? only just manages to do so. The appearance of Claudio’s co-workers is a scenario that repeats enough times to wear thin, a lack of variety bogging down the proceedings. Later in the game, however, a shotgun-toting police officer manages to locate Claudio and offer his assistance, acting as a perfect counter to Claudio’s bullish self-entitlement. His willingness to take the businessman down a peg or two when necessary adds some much-needed wit to the film.
Is it enough to make The End? an outright recommendation for zombie fans? Sadly, the answer is no. As we cross into the second half of the film, it becomes painfully obvious that it’s running out of steam and everything begins to feel distinctly one-note. Whilst Claudio’s attitude does change, he’s still an ass – and not an endearing one. In making him so despicable in the opening, there’s a feeling that Misischia and his co-writer Cristiano Ciccotti may have accidentally made it impossible to ever get the audience fully on side with their leading man. Whether or not he suffers a screaming demise at the hands of the infected just never feels like much of a concern.
The question mark in the title also feels apt for a film that can’t seem to decide when it wants to end – the unremarkable final stretch being a sequence that could easily be trimmed by a few minutes with no discernible loss.
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Film
Categorized:Reviews
