When Watching a Movie Becomes Torture; Why Vermiglio's Visual Beauty Can't Save It
Film Profile:
- Title: Vermiglio
- Director: Maura Delpero
- Cast: Tommaso Ragno, Giuseppe De Domenico, Martina Scrinzi
- Genre: Historical Drama
- Year: 2024
- Award: Grand Jury Prize (Silver Lion) at Venice Film Festival
When facing a film like Vermiglio, the cinema audience is confronted with a difficult dilemma: either surrender to the film’s dragging rhythm and intensely artistic atmosphere or abandon the viewing midway due to sheer exhaustion and boredom. Maura Delpero’s second feature film is a work that blatantly turns its back on mainstream cinema and the rules of entertainment, stubbornly following the path of “Art House” cinema. The story is set in 1944 in a remote village in the Italian Alps; a place where World War II is heard only as a distant echo, and daily life flows at a speed close to zero. The arrival of a deserting soldier named Pietro into the life of a village teacher’s family is supposed to be the driving engine of the drama, but the filmmaker becomes so immersed in depicting futile details and long silences that practically no drama is formed. Watching Vermiglio is akin to watching paint dry on a wall; beautiful, precise, but intensely attritional and annoying. It is a film where time neither passes nor matters; a characteristic that might be appealing to Venice Film Festival jurors, but for an audience seeking story and engagement, it feels like psychological torture.
One of the film’s most distinct technical features, which serves simultaneously as a point of distinction and its Achilles’ heel, is its visual strategy and lens selection. The director and cinematographer have consciously decided to maintain their distance from the subjects. Throughout the film, we rarely witness a close-up. The camera is strangely locked on long shots and medium shots. This choice creates a deep emotional chasm between the audience and the characters. We can never penetrate the minds or feelings of the characters because the camera does not allow us to get close to their eyes. Everything is seen from a distance; people are like moving statues within snowy, postcard landscapes—they move, they speak, but they are not felt. This Brechtian distancing might have been intended to show the smallness of humans against the grandeur of nature and the determinism of history, but the result is the film’s excessive coldness. The audience feels like they are watching an anthropological documentary about “how to milk a cow in 1944” rather than a human drama about love and war. The beauty of the frames is undeniable, but this window-dressing beauty lacks the soul and warmth necessary to engage the viewer.
The film’s narrative structure is also built on this foundation of slowness and stillness. Vermiglio belongs to that category of art films that keep important events in the margins and focus on “mundanity.” The filmmaker insists so much on displaying the minutiae of rural life that the main storyline gets lost. Long sequences without dialogue, static shots of nature, and conversations that have no dramatic function have made the film’s rhythm extremely slow and heavy. It is as if the director deliberately wants to test the spectator’s patience. While festival-loving critics might praise this feature as “poetic” or “contemplative,” the reality is that there is a fine line between “meditative cinema” and “boring cinema,” and Vermiglio unfortunately stands on the latter side. Due to this cold treatment and the camera’s distance, the characters remain strangers to the viewer, and their fates (even the tragedies that occur) leave little emotional impact.
Ultimately, Vermiglio is a perfect example of films that are not made to be “watched,” but to be “admired” in specific circles. It is a museum piece; an object to be looked at from behind glass, not touched. The cinematography, reliant on long shots, while eye-catching and flaunting the grandeur of the Alps, does not serve the narrative and is more suited for creating postcards than cinema. The annoying feeling that creeps up on the audience during the film stems from this very contrast: the contrast between the potential of a romance and war story, and an execution that deliberately avoids any excitement or intimacy. If you are looking for a film that challenges you, entertains you, or tickles your emotions, Vermiglio is the worst possible choice; but if you want to stare at beautiful yet soulless images for two hours and practice patience, you might be able to endure this cold and silent mountain.
