Pupi Avati is the most intelligent and insightful filmmaker working in conventional, narrative-based cinema today. His work, of which this is an excellent example, is consciously aware of the perverted phenomenon that surrounds cinema, and the audience’s willing participation in its construction. Although not openly marginalised, Avati’s films are widely ignored by global critics and theorists, partly because he refuses to work outside of his native Italy – and filmmakers without pro-Hollywood leanings are generally given little credit – but mostly because of his reluctance to work within one style of film-making. Film critics and enthusiasts, namely those clinging to the theory of genre, find it improbable that a skillful and introverted filmmaker would seek to explore as many different subjects for his work as Avati has: they prefer to label such artists as “journeymen” and elevate those producers and directors who work consistently in one or two genres, mainly to remain commercial rather than interesting. But it is precisely this variation in Avati’s work that makes him consistent and recognisable as an artist.

Avati has produced comedies, dramas, horrors and musicals, all with equal aplomb, but he is best known for his 1976 horror film La casa dalle finestre che ridono – a film which is still rare to horror aficionados. Il nascondiglio, like that film and all of Avati’s oeuvre, is constructed like a Chinese puzzle box around a dark, all too human secret. Avati uses the cinema to confront us with awkward truths about human nature, regardless of whether they are ultimately good or bad. His quiet, clinical compositions slowly reveal the mechanisms of the puzzles we chose to ignore, setting up pay-offs we neither expect nor acknowledge. Here, the central character’s tenuous sanity and complex personal history are used as cogs to turn the narrative from merely another ‘spooky old house’ story into something that reflects our own social and extra-personal anxieties. In the end, that same house becomes a metaphor for our place in the world, littered with things best forgotten and, sometimes, better unseen.

Avati and his output deserve greater exposure on the world stage: his work uses the manipulative processes of modern film and television to consistently question the audience’s implicitness in their continuing dominance of the mass audio-visual media, and to reveal the cinematic spectacle in its simplest form at a time when most filmmakers are merely happy to offer visceral, throwaway slices of entertainment. That he isn’t held in high esteem by the same establishment he cannily reflects is another indictment of the shallow, redundant mindset of many modern media professionals. Works like this, in a modern, commercial context, should be cherished and championed in order to cultivate greater understanding of cinema in students and practitioners alike.

Il nascondiglio at the IMDb