Filming Locations: Three Mills Studios, Three Mill Lane, Bow, London, England, UK
Technical Specs
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Goofs:
At the very beginning of the film, Elena calls Francesco to announce Gilderoy's arrival at the studio. Although the film is set in Italy, when she picks up the phone a continuous dial tone is heard, which is normal for the US or UK; however, the actual dial tone would have sounded very differently in Italy, a country where the phone system has a very distinctive and non-continuous dial tone (consisting of a 425Hz tone with a duration of 0.6sec followed by a 1 second pause, followed by a 0.2 sec tone then a 0.2 sec pause, repeated in a loop until the first digit is dialed). See more »
User Review
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Rating:
Saw the film as part of EIFF today, and I mostly liked it. It's an
immensely stylish homage to 70's Italian horror cinema. I was
ridiciously excited for it going in , being a big fan of Peter
Strickland's last film Katalin Varga, and it only really disappointed
me towards the end.
The sets, costumes, lighting, music and most importantly sound effects
all gave the film an awesome 70's atmosphere not dissimilar to Tinker,
Tailor, Soldier, Spy that kept me transfixed throughout.
And something that surprised me: as well as being unsettling, the film
was actually really, truly funny in parts (humor wasn't a big part of
Katalin Varga). There's a lot of winks and nudges to fans of films like
Suspiria, that would have been made in these studios in the first
place. The ridiculous descriptions that the sound recordist gives of
the scenes we only ever hear- "the two women creep along the secret
subterranean poultry tunnel only to find the putrid corpses of the
witches" - are hilarious. The tension and uncertainty builds slowly as
Toby Jones ' gentle British sensibilities clash with the gruesome
scenes he has to score (he has to stab cabbages, pull apart radishes
and smash in courgettes) and with the brash Italians (some really well
played escalating conflict).
But in the last act the film became a little too ambiguous for my
liking. It seemed to attempt a Mulholland Drive-style reversal which
for me didn't really work...I didn't really get what the intention was,
and felt like Strickland had just used it as a flashy excuse to avoid
giving it a real satisfying conclusion.
Still, I had a lot of fun watching the film and would definitely
recommend it.
An irony was that, for a film so dependent on sound for it's
atmosphere,during the screening there was construction going on outside
the screen. So to add to the diagetic horror sounds we annoyingly had
some non-diagetic construction noises!!
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