A new generation of horror An Anthology of Ghost Cities is a fantastic drama written and directed by Denis Cote, who freely drew inspiration from Laurence Olivier’s novel, in which he retained only a few highlights. The story of a village, shaken by the accidental death of one of its inhabitants, generates a metaphorical fable that, as always with the author, moves decisively away from conventions and conventional narrative structures.
The plot can be interpreted with all possible ideas: the isolation of the French-speaking community in the English-speaking stream, the hidden fear of what is alien to us, the desertion of villages and sparsely populated regions, our relationship with death, which develops depending on history, is as intimate as a collective preconceived thought with a very significant impact on the suppressed family.
In short, The Anthology of Ghost Cities is a film that is intentionally very open to interpretation by the viewer, which is undoubtedly confusing. There will be flying people, and strange children in masks, and the so-called “souls” of dead people. In addition to this, the camera work is simply magnificent.
This movie is literally dirty. The lack of a static image gives the flavour of being in the spirit role in the film itself. Now the viewer is not just watching the events unfold sitting in the hall, he is now present in this fictional world. The granularity of the image, obtained thanks to the 16 mm film and natural light, dulls the perception of naturalness, filling the picture with a weighty content and density of the atmosphere. At the same time high-tech environment and retro shooting again reduces the observer to bewilderment.
In form, the film went down the path of horror, and then it slowly bifurcates towards the rural chronicle, torn between social realism and a gradual slide toward the supernatural. The author obviously preferred to revise the genre rather than borrow it. In the end, the film is metaphorized and revealed on topics that disturb society, instead of explicitly turning into a zombie movie or a horror movie with sudden screamers.
7 out of 10