Directed by Pupi Avati
Photographed by Franco Delli Colli
Music by Riz Ortolani
Edited by Amedeo Salfa
Written by Pupi Avati, Maurizio Costanzo, and Antonio Avati
Starring
Gabriele Lavia as Stefano (Novelist)
Anne Canovas as Alessandra
. . .
“Don’t you realize I’m telling you about insane things!”
. . .
Review by William D. Tucker.
There are places known as K-Zones. If you bury the dead in one of them then they will come back to life. A conspiracy involving academics, priests, police, and politicians evolves to conceal the existence of K-Zones since they kinda transform the basic reality of existence. A civilian investigator-a struggling horror novelist-chances upon the secret of K-Zones and tries to unravel their secrets.
Zeder lays it all out for the audience pretty directly, and then lets us observe its protagonist sink deeper into danger. The horror novelist isn’t hapless. He’s actually quick to realize people are lying as part of a vast cover-up. A would-be whistleblower fails to appear at a secret meeting. Everybody he talks to is obviously choosing their words a little too carefully. Most people, if confronted with the situations in Zeder, would simply go home, but the horror novelist cannot resist becoming a Full Protagonist just like he’s been trying to write in one of his rejected manuscripts. It felt to me like his failure as a pulp author had metaphysically displaced his mundane reality with a genre reality. Artistic frustration might be the truly eldritch power at work in the deepest background of this low key saga.
Zeder is a horror mystery centering on a fantastic premise that’s set exclusively in concrete, real world locations, which are all photographed with an unnerving clarity. The look isn’t nearly as shadowy as one might assume. It ends up being about how a t-shirt and jeans Everyman navigates mundane spaces that have been infused with otherworldly dread. It’s light on the blood and gore. Zeder leans into dialogues of interrogation and atmospheric traversals. By accident it resonates more with point and click adventure games than contemporary horror movie trends. The soundtrack emphasizes a tightly looped motif of tension and danger much like a video game soundtrack. It also vibes with trendy Terminally Online aesthetics: Urbex, Dead Mall shit, Liminality-I wouldn’t be surprised if a YouTube or Nebula grifter has done a video essay on Zeder.
Zeder is an engaging film experience if one doesn’t get too caught up in the plausibility of the K-Zone idea, which is not overtly explained in detail-nor should it be. Zeder works best as a chronicle of a t-shirt and jeans guy’s odyssey into the unknown despite the best efforts of creepy, aggressive gatekeepers-the church, the cops, the academy, the state-to keep him puttering about upon the surface of things. It might not even be a conspiracy about policing the borderline between the worlds of Life and Death so much as it is about enforcing the border between being a Protagonist of a grandiose narrative and just settling for being a nobody in the great crowd of nobodies.
