Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
The Queen of Selvascura risks everything to be a mother; the King of Roccaforte falls in love with the voice of a mysterious girl; the King of Altomonte becomes obsessed with a flea and neglects his daughter.
Tale of Tales is a visually sumptuous and tonally audacious anthology of dark fairy tales from Matteo Garrone, adapting Giambattista Basile's 17th-century stories with unflinching strangeness. Its cinematography is genuinely exceptional — lush, painterly Italian locations rendered with operatic grandeur and grotesque beauty that few fantasy films can match. Its novelty is equally high: the film occupies a singular space between art cinema and dark fantasy, uncompromising in its weirdness and refusing the comforts of either mainstream fantasy or conventional arthouse drama. The plotting is episodic and deliberately disjointed, which suits the anthology structure but leaves some threads feeling underdeveloped or emotionally distant. The acting is solid across the board — Salma Hayek, Vincent Cassel, and Toby Jones all commit fully — but the deliberately stylized register can limit emotional engagement. The endings of each tale are darkly satisfying in a fable sense, though the cumulative conclusion is somewhat muted rather than cathartic.