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“The guests” (2023) by Svevo Moltrasio – Review

Svevo Moltrasio's first work was financed thanks to a fundraiser

“The guests” (2023) by Svevo Moltrasio – Review.

It's dark outside, it's raining. Inside a farmhouse several kilometers outside Rome the light goes out. Not even this is enough to stop the argument between the ten characters, all protagonists, of the film "The Guests" by Svevo Moltrasio. When one of them finally decides to go and reconnect the electricity, silence returns, but the plots of secrets, gossip and disagreements that led the guests to argue do not go away. For a moment however, it seems that the tone of this holiday has lightened and this group of people can go back to joking. This illusion is broken when all the friends realize the presence of the tenth guest, yet another.

Perfect strangers?

The incipit of the film is simple: a stranger bursts into a group of friends, whose company is held together by a cheap glue made of many small secrets, and explodes the conflicts that had been silenced until then. It doesn't matter that the stranger is in the flesh, it's just a trigger for the ensemble story, just like the decision to share cell phones in "Perfect Strangers", a film to which "The Guests" was compared. In reality this is a forced similarity and the two films are very different. If it is true that there are few stories to tell and they can all be traced back to some models, it is even more true that the ways of bringing these stories before the spectator are infinite.

Arguments and plots

This film cannot rely on a cast of well-known actors, and perhaps it would have lost its strength, but it relies entirely on the tension it manages to unleash through the strength of the dialogues, both those spoken out loud and those whispered, but above all the ones silent. . Precisely what is left unsaid among the guests, which can be guessed but which remains omitted due to embarrassment, fear or simple good manners, helps to hide a real mystery and creates a rift with the much more famous film by Paolo Genovese. The reasons for the arguments are not presented like a menu to all the guests, nor are they put on the table, in fact no one wants to eat anymore in this film. And in the end they disappear too, showing, in the face of the inexplicable, a more profoundly human root, which goes beyond everyday issues.

High voltage

If from the first scenes the film shows some technical limitations, especially regarding photography, what this film does not lack is courage. As we get to the epilogue, we see the firmness with which this project was written, inevitable in testing all the guests on stage. There is no eclipse to save the characters who, having received the answer they seek throughout the evening, will have to deal with the truth and the traumas they had to expose in the search for it. There is no long or very long shot to break the magic that glues viewers to the screen. There is no happy ending, but there is a good ending.

First work and fundraising

“The Guests” is Svevo Moltrasio's first work. Indeed, “The Guests” would have been Svevo Moltrasio's first work, if it had been lucky enough to have had traditional distribution. Instead the author, after having collected the budget necessary for the production of the film through a fundraiser among his supporters - already leaving the daily process of Italian productions -, bypassed the classic channels, in this case obstacles, of traditional distribution, bringing the film to the public without mediation.

A question of merit

Through agreements with cinemas, which guaranteed the first shows and undertook to add others in the event of tickets sold and seats occupied, he made his way from Rome to Milano, also arriving in Turin. In fact, "The Guests" has earned every screening, every theater and every city in which paying spectators, it must be said, have decided to choose Moltrasio, seeing in this little film something that seems to have escaped those who are interested in cinema. employed by profession.

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