Tuesday, 18 January 2022

Agony (2020)

Original title The Executrix and it's an Italian chiller/thriller/horror/suspense film which I was struggling to make sense of! It's a bit surreal in places and puts you in mind of something arty-farty from Roman Polanski decades ago!

It's about this woman who thought her mother had dies 30 years ago only to be told by a lawyer that she had just died now and she's inherited a huge house and loads of land in Italy. She lives with husband in the USA so we start off in English then morph into Italian and subtitles as the family arrive in Tuscany.

This is when the weird starts as it turns out her mother was possessed by, well, something, which caused her inner demons and ended up with her hanging herself. She had kept her daughter away from the home and pretended to be dead so that the daughter could have a chance of an ordinary life away from the chaos.

They're all artist of course (what else?) so flounce around the place in flowing robes and hoods being frightfully creative! Anyway, this is where we start to enter the surreal and wonder if what we're seeing is what everyone else is seeing or just her and she waves in and out of visions of her mother and nasty-looking scenes from the past (or is it present)?!

Asia Argento is actually pretty engaging in the lead role and apart from all the annoying arty-farty stuff portrays a troubled and partly possessed woman coming from a relatively normal life into the mayhem. It's not very clear why the mother kept her away from all the devilish stuff in Italy but then left it all to her in her will presumably knowing she'd then go there are get sucked in!

The rest of the cast do a decent enough supporting job and the Italian countryside and sets in and around the house and grounds are lovely and well shot (when we're not seeing it through a surreal red filter)!

It's a good enough little film which comes across very much like an Indie outing which is shot in a style that you'll either suck or or hate. The outcome and ending are very predictable so you just have to hang in their and enjoy the art or shrug after half an hour and put something else on!

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