A case involving a pair of missing teenagers opens up a centuries-old mystery that a police inspector feels compelled to put onto video since he fears for his life. At the time of the disappearance, a young woman was discovered, dishevelled, in the woods nearby. Does she have anything to do with an ancient manuscript found in a hidden tomb near where the teens went missing?
Writer/director Francesco Erba takes a unique approach for his feature debut, melding several styles that could easily have been a muddled mess. The majority of the story is presented in a first-person format. Not quite ‘found footage’ but not regular filmmaking either. A section filmed with a camera placed on a dog’s head is both ingenious and dizzying. The medieval segments are delivered via stop-motion-type animation involving stylised puppets. With only a musical accompaniment, these scenes are hauntingly beautiful with a character of their own. It’s to Erba’s credit that this approach doesn’t jar with the rest of the live-action story.
Although it’s presented episodically, there’s a lot to unpick in Erba’s movie. Primaeval rites and alchemy clash together with religious and modern sensibilities in a story that spans a vast amount of time. The animation adds an eeriness to the narrative as if we’re being told a tale passed down through the ages, but the modern scenes tell us a different story as if this is something we’re not meant to know and is dangerous to do so. Despite there being three separate narratives being told, Erba grafts them together perfectly.
As in Heaven, So on Earth proves there is still plenty of originality in Italian cinema and has an atmosphere that draws the viewer in from the start.
