Director: Vincenzo Lamagna
Cast: Giuseppe Madonna
Running time: 1min
Advertising a short film by making an even shorter music video might feel like an odd choice at the best of times – there is only so much you can show without spoiling the plot – but at just over one minute, Vincenzo Lamagna’s micro-short feels even stranger. There is just so little to see in Wrong, that it is hard to say if it gives any impression of A Dark Tale at all.
As far as I can tell from IMDb, the larger 25-minute project this points us to is a fantasy drama, about a young brother and sister living in the shadow of poverty, crime and familial abuse. The music video Wrong, by contrast, is a decidedly upbeat affair – filled with warm imagery of the story’s central brother and sister, cruising in the comforting and familiar space of a car’s back seats, while (presumably) their father drives them around on a sunny day.
The imagery is easy on the eye, and will tap into a lot of fuzzy nostalgia for many viewers, recalling their own journeys to the beach, or to amusement parks, and so on – feeling utterly safe in the presence of a loving parent. However, beyond a solitary clip of the two-standing wide-eyed in a darkened room, one covering their mouth, there is not much here to clue you into the more sinister turns that seem to be inevitably on their way in A Dark Tale.
That’s more of a problem than it might usually be, because this is not a standalone work. If it were, then I would probably just evaluate it as a cute and pleasant set of images, set to an inoffensive Jamiroquai-esque song by Giuseppe Madonna. It doesn’t pull up any trees, but it’s nice – and that’s no bad thing for a regular music video. But the ‘movie-tie-in’ is a different creature altogether.
Music videos for movie-tie-ins are usually riotously enjoyable because of their tonal dissonance, their absurdity in the service of advertising a larger and more complex product. That means they admittedly don’t usually work as a narrative in their own right, in the way you might want a music video to do. But they need to ensure people know there is going to be some variation in the product they will encounter, should they head to the cinema for the full film.
The song itself for Wrong doesn’t seem like the ideal choice for the basis of this clip on this basis. It is just too pleasant. There are no transitions or melodical shifts where darker imagery might feel like a fit. There isn’t enough space for such transitions in such a short piece of music anyway. It might have been an idea for Lamagna to focus on a longer song from A Dark Tale’s soundtrack (all by Giuseppe Madonna, who cameos in this clip), with a bit more room for emotional manoeuvre in that case. We might then have had more opportunities to see what we are actually in for in the wider film – and prepare for it.
As it is, Wrong is a nice, quick-fire video. It’s a set of earnest, relatable memories, suitably picked to accompany an agreeable-if-unchallenging tune. But it may not be the best marketing tool for A Dark Tale as a result.