Past Misdeeds: A Whisper In The Dark (1976)

Original title: Un sussurro nel buio

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

A rich Italian family lives the life of the rich and idle in their palatial mansion in the country. Things aren't quite as perfect as they seem, though. It's not just that family father Alex (John Phillip Law) is something of a jerk who cheats on his wife Camilla (Nathalie Delon) with a friend of hers who is staying as a house guest, or that the regularly visiting grandmother is a nasty old bint hiding her unpleasant interior behind impeccable manners, or that the family's two daughters make eardrum-shattering screeching noises whenever they open their mouths, or that Camilla's nerves are so on edge that she's bound to become the sort of hysteric that only exists in the mind of Freudians and filmmakers one day. No, all that is minor trouble when compared to the family's true problem.

Their little son Martino (Alessandro Poggi), you see, has an invisible friend called Luca on whom he seems to be more fixated than can be seen as healthy, but, quite unlike most invisible friends, Luca has a way of making his presence known physically. Luca moves objects around often enough to have Camilla and the nanny Francoise (Olga Bisera) believe the invisible child is more than just a figment of Martino's imagination. What's even more disturbing for Camilla is the fact that the name her son has given to his invisible playmate is the same she and Alex had given the stillborn boy they had before Martino, something the kid shouldn't know about at all.

Luca's presence becomes ever more direct, and though he seems to have the family's best interests in mind, he's not exactly unthreatening. Alex and Camilla decide their son needs professional help, but - not surprising to anyone watching - the usual neurological examinations find nothing at all. Alex manages to get hold of a rather dubious professor (Joseph Cotten) interested in the Weird, who is willing to move in with the family to take a closer look at Martino (and Luca). Although Alex doesn't realize it (obviously, being a jerk he ignores all of his wife's doubts), the Professor's interest in Martino isn't so much that of a doctor wanting to cure a patient, but rather that of a man having found an especially interesting lab rat. Of course, this isn't the sort of thing Luca will tolerate, and he defends his brother/creator/father in a rather lethal way. Alas, once a supernatural entity has begun with the murders, it tends not to stop with them again that easily.

Marcello Aliprandi's A Whisper In The Dark is Italian horror cinema of the 70s at its most typical: stylishly directed, beautifully photographed and drenched in a dream-like mood that is heightened by a fantastic Pino Donaggio soundtrack. It's a film occupying itself with creating an atmosphere for the audience's minds to inhabit, and not so much one interested in telling a clearly defined story. The film's pace is slow, very slow, from beginning to end, and what might sound like a clear increase in dramatic tension when looking at the plot on paper never feels as such when one is actually watching the film, because Aliprandi doesn't do dramatic tension as it us usually understood. Instead of working by the dramaturgical rules of the thriller, the film stops and starts, interspersing moments of tension and drama with scenes that prefer to circle around the things that are happening, or just hint at the things that might be happening or the motives that might be lying behind the characters' actions. For example, the film clearly insinuates that Cotten's Professor isn't wholly trustworthy through a certain shiftiness in the actor's behaviour (and the fact that he likes nothing more than let the family's maid bring him iced vodka to his bathtub, something he calls "imperative" for his mind to work), but it never outright shows or tells how bad his plans truly are, so that it never becomes clear how much of an act of self defence by Luca and/or Martino (again, if Luca is a telekinetic product of Martino's subconscious or his dead brother or something else is kept ambiguous) his murder truly is.

As an audience, we can speculate about the clearly supernatural, we can put our interpretative faculties into understanding it, yet we can never really know it.

Aliprandi uses a similar technique when it comes to the thematic underpinnings of his film. It's quite obvious that a part of the film's subtext is circling the way the child they have once lost has influenced the marriage and life of Camilla and Alex, and that Luca might be more of an externalisation of Camilla's inability to let go of her lost child (which in turn might be responsible for Alex being like he is), an interpretation that is certainly strengthened by the film's ending, but this isn't the sort of film ever willing to get concrete about, well, anything. Instead, A Whisper in the Dark hints and insinuates, and let's the audience do the thinking for themselves.


That's probably the point where friends of clear, linear narratives and directness in their horror movies will throw their remotes disgustedly at their TVs, but A Whisper in the Dark, like many of the most interesting European horror movies of the 70s, was not made with ideas like clarity and directness as virtues in mind at all, and therefore wasn't made for anybody expecting these things. It's all about the mood, the things that might be, and the things that happen inside of a viewer just willing to take a look, to feel and to speculate.