Director: Leonardo Valenti
Writer: Leonardo Valenti
Cast: Leonardo Valenti, Perrine Valenti, Nino Valenti, Anna Valenti
Running time: 4mins
48-hour film challenges have had mixed results at best, when it comes to Indy Film Library reviews. Efforts range from the excellent Answer Your Phone, to the passable Een Doodewone Dag, to the excruciating Lost. It is hard to place Behind the Door within that scale.
Reiterating my long-standing point that the star system is arbitrary – and more for PR than for actual evaluation – this final grade looks harsh. Because while Behind the Door is not the best 48-hour film we’ve ever received, it’s a long way from being the worst; and I believe it may well be the most wholesome.
Essentially amounting to a home movie, the production involves the whole Valenti family. Filmed in two halves – with writer-director Leonardo (who you may remember from Te L(e)o Comando) and daughter Anna in Paris; and son Nino and wife Perrine in Brittany – the gang make a valiant effort to make a short horror film.
The surprising thing about such a cutesy production unit is that the film actually delivers a half-decent chill. Leonardo Valenti, playing the character ‘Leonardo’, is prevented from returning home to Nino and Perrine, when he becomes trapped in a hotel room (at which point Perrine cracks a pretty good joke about her husband’s advancing senility). But as Leonardo attempts to get to the bottom of the situation, things take a supernatural twist – when, believing he is on the phone to room-service, he is assured that the voice on the other end will be able to help in no time at all… Cue creaky doors and a sudden sinking feeling as we realise with Leonardo his room is not as empty as we thought.
It is a decent scare – achieved in spite of the film ratio (recording in vertical video makes this feel slightly like something your ageing relatives would share from their Tik Tok scrolling); as well as the fact that everything is delivered in broad daylight. Indeed, the broader film does suffer, if you really take it to be a horror, from its blindingly-lit rooms, where it is patently clear that nothing is lurking in any of the shadowless corners, in either location.
A cut-and-paste horror score by-numbers is dropped into the final edit to try and conjure up a little atmosphere, but in doing so only serves to further highlight just how unthreatening everything is. And while Anna Valenti does a good job of sinister hand-acting, as a ‘creature’ begins to crawl out of the bathroom in Leonardo’s locked room, the arm which creeps and crawls from behind the door is just visually normal – and could have probably done with some (even rushed and improvised) make-up to make us feel this might be a clammy, sinister The Ring-type spirit.
But again, that’s if you really take this at face value, as a straight-up attempt to horrify us. But the simple fact is, even I am not so joyless as to do this. Leonardo Valenti (and his team/family) clearly know what they are doing – but they also have the intelligence not to take themselves too seriously all the time. It’s a lesson I could do with learning sometimes. Behind the Door might not be the next The Grudge, but it was clearly a blast to make, and gave the family a great opportunity for some creative bonding, even over distance. That, on top of momentary chills it achieves in spite of all that, mean I’d be wrong to complain.
