The Girl in the Fog (2017)

Original title: La ragazza nella nebbia

One December, 23rd, teenager Anna Lou disappears from a secluded little town in the Italian Alps. Big city investigator Vogel (Toni Servillo) is called in to take care of the case. On the outside, Vogel is the picture of a serious, professional and competent policeman, but the direction he takes in his investigation soon makes clear that he sees himself not as a seeker of truth or justice but as the man brought in to give the public what it wants. Truth, justice or the actual well-being of a victim and their family, or the actual guilt of the people he accuses of a crime  hardly even register on his compass. In fact, the film does suggest he’s one of those famous high-functioning sociopaths, though it does so subtly and ambiguously.

So when Vogel latches on on some vague, highly circumstantial evidence pointing in the direction of local school teacher Loris Martini (Alessio Boni), he spends most of his time manipulating the press against the man, and very little on actual investigative work whatsoever. Consequently, the rather complicated truth of the matter is going to elude him for quite some time.

As far as twisty, psychologically motivated crime thrillers go, Donato Carrisi’s film based on his own novel is certainly right up there with the cream of the crop. It’s a film that hardly makes a misstep, easily convincing its audience even of the really much too complicated villainous plan that has way too many moments that’ll only work when total strangers act exactly as the perpetrator wants this will eventually to have been about on the plot-level.

Carrisi achieves this through a calm, focussed presentation that may not be as cold as his protagonists are but lacks any love for melodrama, calmly observing private catastrophes where other films would aim straight for the audience’s adrenal glands, making a deeper emotional impact exactly by not straining so hard for it on a surface level. Even though I am not a fan of the twisty thriller format in general, the director/writer’s calm and sure hand works wonders to convince even of slight implausibilities, mostly because there’s never any doubt the film knows where it wants to go and how to get there; it’s also playing fair with its audience, providing us all the clues we need to understand what’s really going on, but subtly enough to not stick our noses into it.

The film’s rather economical that way too, with scenes often taking on a kind of double-meaning – one looked when looked at straightforwardly, one with a cynical eye – so that even something a simple as a framing device in which Vogel has a little nightly chat with a psychiatrist (Jean Reno) is used for more than just straightforward narrative purposes. At the same time, the plot doesn’t feel overloaded, its intricate construction presented as if all of this were very straightforward and perfectly natural.


On a philosophical level, this is so cynical I’m tempted to call it a neo noir, even though its actual DNA seems closer to contemporary thrillers and – eventually – highly constructed mysteries. It’s not just that every single one of the authority figures (except for the female head of the local police, who doesn’t have much actual authority here, though) in a so-called respectable job in the film turns out to be utterly untrustworthy, at best fixated on giving the public appearance of doing their duty and making money through it, but never interested in what that duty is actually supposed to mean. The The Girl in the Fog clearly argues that this is indeed the way the world works. If there is any kind of crude justice actually happening (the film keeps this act off-screen, of course), it’s not actual justice but only the result of Vogel’s aggrieved vanity.