I'm Not Scared
(2004)
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Italian director Gabriele Salvatores' (MEDITERRANEO) masterfully directs this eerie and engrossing suspense thriller involving a 10-year-old boy who lives in rural southern Italy. It is summertime and Michele (Guiseppe Cristiano) is free to spend the long sunny days riding his bike and running through the wheat fields. In fact, the wheat could be considered Michele's costar, as it often consumes the entire scope of the screen showing how Michele plays, hides, and ponders life in the vast expanses of flowing yellow stalks. Because there are only a few other children in the village Michele often plays alone, and one day he discovers a hole in the ground, obscured by wheat, where a boy his age is chained and imprisoned. The boy has clearly been starved and mistreated, yet Michele approaches him fearlessly and attempts to make friends with him. With the dreaminess that is a 10-year-old's truest treasure, Michele doesn't ask too many questions, nor does he draw conclusions about why the boy is in the hole, or who put him there. Through the expressions on young Michele's face, viewers can read his light questioning of human existence, human morality, and human rights. However, as the film draws on, subtly revealing shocking secrets about the adults in Michele's village, the beauty of this utterly simple yet deadly powerful plot come clear. I'M NOT SCARED is a moving film built on crystal clear images of the Italian sun, sky, and wheat fields; strangely offset by its startling loss-of-innocence story. |
A stunning shot of sunshine on a sea of golden corn contrasts markedly with the dark secret that ten-year-old Michele (Giuseppe Cristiano) discovers in a hole beneath the ruined farmhouse where he and his friends play. At first he thinks the foot glimpsed beneath some rags must belong to a body, then he realises it is a boy chained up. I'm Not Scared starts off as an offbeat horror, contrasting the beauty of the southern Italian countryside and the innocence of its protagonist with a mood of genuine unease and foreboding. All too often in Hollywood horror films, the viewer knows what is about to happen, but here the audience has no more idea than Michele, which is what makes the early scenes so riveting. The film evolves into something that is part thriller, part family drama and part rite-of-passage, with just a nod in the direction of Christian allegory. Director Gabriele Salvatores just about holds it all together, aided by some wonderfully evocative cinematography.