Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
In a small suburb on the outskirts of Rome, the cheerful heat of summer camouflages a stifling atmosphere of alienation. From a distance, the families seem normal, but it’s an illusion: in the houses, courtyards and gardens, silence shrouds the subtle sadism of the fathers, the passivity of the mothers and the guilty indifference of adults. But it’s the desperation and repressed rage of the children that will explode and cut through this grotesque façade, with devastating consequences for the entire community.
Bad Tales (Favolacce) is a quietly devastating Italian suburban horror that earns its distinctions. The D'Innocenzo brothers craft a plot of layered, elliptical dread — suburban malaise rendered with fairy-tale grotesquerie and deadpan menace. The cinematography is exceptional: flat, sun-bleached compositions that make the mundane feel suffocating and complicit. Novelty is high — the film has a genuinely singular voice, blending Haneke-esque social critique with absurdist fable and a detached, almost ethnographic narration that feels wholly original. Acting is competent and naturalistic, with the adults effectively unsettling, though no single performance transcends into truly memorable territory. The ending is conceptually bold but slightly diffuse in its execution, leaving an unease that lingers without fully landing the emotional payoff its buildup promises.