The Shadow Within
R4 DVD
Peacock Films
The Shadow Within is an intriguing Italian ghost tale by
Silvana Zancolo, it has worked its way through various indie film festivals and
arrives on DVD via Peacock Films. Maurice Dumont is a young isolated, nine year
old boy who lives alone with his ice queen of a mother. He is denied an
education (she even burns his school books) and only gets access to medical
care when a nurse visits the home.
The local town is tradition bound and racked with diphtheria,
children are dying and yet the local folk refuse to take advice from the city
trained doctor. The fact she is a woman does not help. It seems that no woman
can train to be a doctor locally and she needed to travel a long distance to
get her qualifications. While most men are at war her husband has stayed behind
as the school teacher. This, of course, increases the suspicious nature of the
locals and their resentment.
Marie and Maurice live in a house that is decrepit and
decayed and they survive on a starvation diet.
While Marie may believe she is doing what is right it seems
in the end all she really wants is to protect her property and use her son for
cheap labor - she is narrow, vicious and cruel. The comparison between the
sensitive, sad, otherworldly child and the selfish and cruel mother is powerfully
made. While you feel some sympathy and perhaps wonder whether her cruelty is
called by grief, you cannot bring yourself to excuse it.
The locals are superbly portrayed as dour people who seem to
dress in black and be obsessed with death and dying. While their men folk may
be away at war, they seem unable to bring themselves to live a normal life or
allow their children to have a “childhood”. Rather than accepting the death of
their children and moving on, they become obsessed with contacting them in the
afterlife and keeping them alive via Maurice.
Maurice however is not totally alone; he has the ability to
see between the veil of life and death and communicates with Jacques, his
deceased brother. Maurice finds the spirit of his brother becoming strong and
stronger and more and more difficult to control. His brother not only appears
during the day and night but starts to do strange things around the house.
As her grief overwhelms his mother Marie, she falls under the
influence of Madame Armand, who is an avid spiritualist. She convinces Marie to
use her son to act as a medium to the spirit world. As Jacques increases his
influence over Maurice, he comes to the realization that they both desire the
same thing: their parents' love. There is one problem; Jacques does not want to
return to the living, he wants his parents to join him in death.
There is a lot of interest in this film. Granted, the plot is
nothing new, but the atmosphere of the film is chilling and the suffocating
narrowness of the Marie and the village is palpable. The way she reacts to the
local school teacher and doctor is such an embodiment of small mindedness that
it makes you cringe. The way in which a tale of the clash between city and
village life is intertwined with a ghost tale is intriguing.
The images of dolls, shadows, ghostly images are impressive
and create quite a mood; the quality of the stop motion animation should also
be noted.
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This
review will appear in Volume 2 No.4
(2009) of the digital and print edition of Synergy Magazine.
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