Director: Congrega Esoterica Padovana
Year: 2025
Country: Italy
Alternate Titles: Frammenti – I Veneratori di Morte
Genre: Exploitation
Plot:
Presented as a series of interludes and visual skits, a woman joins forces with an enigmatic figure that soon forces her to confront the possibility of life after death when the series of occult practices he partakes in are a bit too extreme.
Review:
This was a genuinely solid and intriguing occult-focused film. The fine starting point here, involving the series of glimpses we get here, indicating that something is going on with the dark and macabre visuals presented, sets the stage for what’s to come as this one goes along. The sense of deranged hallucinations and genuinely unnerving occult practices, from cracking apart a human skull to dark rituals involving special powders, creating ornate decorations from living beings draped in maggots, or forms of graphic mutilation involving stylized objects over specific patterns, add immeasurably to what’s happening. The use of eerie, minimalistic black-and-white photography for these scenes provides the kind of atmosphere required for these types of unconventional sequences to see their maximum shock value get milked, making everything come together as the film goes along, as with the expected crude gore effects and constant nudity, it all makes this one come together rather nicely.
The presentation of the film, though, might be a bit of a stumbling block for some to overcome. The near-dialogue-free production, requiring the few interstitial cards that pip up to reveal certain events taking place in specific periods, leaves a lot of the film to feel aimless and improvised, as the actions being performed are what bring about any sense of storyline taking place. So little of this one remains clear or intentional until far too late in the history of this one that it’s entirely possible to look at this as a performance art piece to the soundtrack blaring away in the background and that it genuinely doesn't provide much in the way of a full-on story with what’s happening conceptually being the point of it all. That is wiped away when it finally reveals its true purpose at the end, but it’s the getting there that might be cause for concern with this one.
Overview: ***.5/5
An intriguing and generally bizarre genre piece, this one comes together better as a series of unconventional and confrontational sequences rather than anything else, which might not always be for everyone's taste out there. Those with a taste for the bizarre or who appreciate the style on display will have the most to like here, while those turned off by these factors might want to heed caution.
Comments
Post a Comment