REVIEW: Ghost Story? Noir? Romance? The Double Hour Keeps You Guessing

Bodies drop around Sonia (Ksenia Rappoport) from the first scene of The Double Hour, Giuseppe Capotondi's elliptical neo-noir. Whether she's being stalked by death or is herself the tall, dark stranger is a question that emerges slowly, developing like a crime scene photograph in a closed room just beyond the frame. A hotel maid six months on the job in Turin, Italy, Sonia rarely smiles and barely flinches when she discovers the suicide of a guest. Cool-blooded by nature or numbed from the outside in?

Though the physical opposite of Sonia's Slavic blondeness (Rappoport recalls the chilled contours of Vera Farmiga, with tea-green eyes for Farmiga's blue tourmaline), Guido (Filippo Timi) is her equal in emotional vacancy. Somehow, these two shrug off complacency long enough to drag themselves to a speed-dating boondoggle, where they eventually face each other for three awkward but intriguing minutes. Reticent, wry, sloe-eyed Guido seems to use the event as a more efficient alternative to online hook-ups. Gently turned down by Sonia at the end of the night, he offers the next best option: a trip to the depressive wonderland that is a widower's bachelor pad.

The first half hour or so of The Double Hour is dedicated to the quick-rising romance activated between Sonia and Guido, who find each other again in the light of day. Though we take a brief detour into Guido's queasy one-night stand, ours is subtly but predominantly Sonia's perspective, a choice that seems quizzical early on -- hardly a conduit, she's a frustratingly difficult read -- and proves quite daring down this film's zig-zagging line.

Capotondi has said he was influenced by the 1970s and '80s Italian tradition of horror-thrillers called "giallo" -- the milieu of directors like Dario Argento and Mario Bava -- and gathered other inspirations, like atmospheric Japanese horror, further afield. Certainly the film veers into pulpy straights when ex-detective Guido abandons his post as the security guard at a vacant, sprawling, richly appointed villa for a nooner elsewhere on the grounds with Sonia. Guido is punished for getting to first base, American slasher-style, with a pistol whip to the face. The couple are then captured by balaclava-wearing bandits, and must watch as the villa is efficiently denuded of its treasures. The robbery goes awry, and in what is set up as a snoozy story of the redemptive power of love for lonely working class Italians, one of the main characters is buried before we hit the third reel.

To say too much about what actually happens would be to rob you of the film's risks and narrative ripostes. What should be noted is that Capotondi makes ambitious use of an unreliable narrator in a way that is rarely seen in modern films. There is no multiplicity of perspective, no overt, forensic investigation of "what really happened," and no voice over. Confusing and sometimes confounding, this dedicated but inexplicit approach to perspective -- similar to the less oblique psychodrama of Black Swan -- eventually pays dividends. The mid-section of The Double Hour segues into a ghost story that itself feels haunted by the gumshoe footsteps of classic noir. It's one of several thematic doublings that, added together, transform this refractive genre exercise into a wholly memorable love story.