Article by Silvia De Gattis

Translation by Cinzia Di Bucchianico

Throughout Gianluca Minucci’s debut film, viewers find themselves in a state of constant auditory, visual, emotional, even tactile, and olfactory hyper-solicitation.

The intermittent and metallic noises of the train on which the characters are travelling turn out to be as deafening as silence. It is precisely in the silence, in what is unspoken and unsaid by the characters, that the seed of doubt lies—the anguish of never knowing for certain who we are facing or whom we can trust are precisely hidden in the characters’ silence, unspoken and unsaid. Silence is the sound of paranoia to which the aural environment and Zbigniew Preisner’s original musical compositions act as a counterpoint. What scares us more? The others in front of us whom we don’t know or ourselves, with our inner voices that take over when everything is silent?

Entirely set on a train that crosses central Europe in 1940, this film is a sort of chamber play on multiple levels, between philology and epic. The sense of oppression and anguish are emphasized by the cramped and suffocating space of the train that seems to be travelling without a concrete destination. The world that comes to life on screen appears to be thus circumscribed inside that train, which constitutes the microcosm where the dynamics between characters are developed, not by chance, by actors with a strong theatrical background.

A journey that seems suspended in space and time, wrapped in an almost sacral aura. However, Minucci and Patrick Karlsen’s four-handed writing work gives it an unequivocal historical and philological coherence back.