Orfeo

Situated somewhere between the worlds of Tim Burton and Jean Cocteau, with a dash of Argento and Anger too, this entrancing fantasy film from Virgilio Villoresi replays the Orpheus myth in an ornate, handcrafted 1960s Milan, where a lonesome pianist falls in love at first sight with the beguiling Eura. Boy loses girl, boy follows girl into a heavily saturated underworld… We can imagine the rest.

Adapted from Dino Buzzati’s 1969 graphic novel Poema a fumetti (considered Italy’s first), Villoresi’s ravishing debut combines beautiful 16mm photography, deliriously stylized sets, meticulously orchestrated stop-motion animation, and in-camera optical effects to arrive at a mesmerizing, artisanal work that announces its director as one of Italian cinema’s most exciting new voices.

Orfeo is a voluptuously composed film in which animation marries fiction, reality marries dreams, and poetry marries mysticism. A decidedly original work of art that recalls the decadent opulence of Dario Argento but also the esoterism of Maya Deren or Kenneth Anger, Orfeo delves into the heart of cinema, where nothing is what it seems and all can turn into its opposite.

Muriel del Don, Cineuropa