MOVIE REVIEW 'I'm Not Scared' frightens

The story encourages us to be afraid.
By MICHAEL O'SULLIVAN
WASHINGTON POST
Everything in "I'm Not Scared," from the weather to the wildlife, is fraught with malevolence. When it rains in this lingeringly creepy Italian thriller -- which centers around a child's kidnapping, but whose true subject is man's capacity for evil and the loss of innocence -- the drops hit the dusty brown earth like fat, warm tears.
When an animal appears on screen -- an owl, a snake, a hedgehog, a chicken -- it is, as often as not, dead and bloody. At one point, a raccoon is discussed, but never seen, yet its invisible presence fills the screen with a kind of baleful foreboding.
That's because all the action of "I'm Not Scared" is seen through the only dimly comprehending eyes of a 10-year-old boy. Thanks to director Gabriele Salvatores' almost painfully sensitive camerawork, we don't just see what Michele (Giuseppe Cristiano) sees, we feel what he feels. And when he is at a loss to explain the behavior of the adults in his life, which is suddenly quite often, we share his confusion. This kind of deliberate disorientation keeps the audience constantly off balance, and it's brilliantly effective.
Kind and sensitive, Michele lives with his parents (Aitana Sanchez-Gijon and Dino Abbrescia) and younger sister (Giulia Matturo) in rural southern Italy.
One day, while out playing near the ruins of an old farmhouse, he finds a pit covered with a piece of corrugated metal and camouflaged with straw. Inside, disheveled, pale and shivering, is a child.
Overcomes fear
Slowly, Michele overcomes his own fear, bringing first water, then food, then companionship to the boy (Mattia Di Pierro), who it turns out is named Filippo and is about Michele's age. Even more slowly, Michele begins to learn why Filippo is down there and who put him there. Suffice it to say the facts aren't pretty.
As disturbing as the revelations are, though, they don't shatter Michele's world. Not immediately, at any rate. Not when our young hero sees the people who are close to him behaving one way toward him and another, far crueler way toward someone else. It doesn't make sense to him, and it can't possibly make sense to us either. That tension -- between love and hate, between good and evil, between what we want to be true and what we know to be true -- is masterfully played out by Salvatores, who makes the film's casual betrayals seem abominable and prosaic at the same time.
Unlike conventional thrillers, there isn't much asking "who done it" here. Once we and Michele figure that out (and it's relatively early on), the only real question is how to act.
Stomach-churning story
Unless you're a 10-year-old boy, it's obvious. But Michele can't reconcile the world he thought he lived in with the one he has unearthed, and it paralyzes him, in a way. It will come as no shock to moviegoers (or to readers of the daily paper) that the world is depraved. But Salvatores' sad, scary and beautiful film goes well beyond telling us merely that. It's the kind of stomach-churning bedtime story that encourages us to be afraid, without ever being able to reassure us, like a parent, that it'll all be OK in the end.