Darkness (Buio) - Final Girls Berlin Film Festival

The apocalypse has happened the world has finally gone mad and destroyed itself leaving ashes and a deadly radiation. But curiously it only affects women! And so daily life for sisters Luce (Gaia Bucci), Stella (Denise Tantucci) and Aria (Olimpia Tosatto) is one of confinement, physical training and study until the clock chimes and a man (Their father played by Valerio Binasco.) in full PPE walks through the heavily protected front door. Decontaminated he brings food and stories of women’s eyes falling out and other such horrors.

The girls do have ‘air day’ when they mask up fully to go out but with masks that block out the sun so they can’t see it’s not much fun. On top of this father runs the place with some brutality not shy from hitting the women and keeping them cowered with his book on the apocalypse which he reads as gospel. It flies over Aria’s head who is too young to understand but has captured Luce. However Stella is more observant and when dad goes missing for a while leaving the girls on the verge of starvation, Stella decides to improvise a PPE and venture out into the world.

This isn’t new ground by any means but there is an originality in a disaster that only affects women and with that at the centre its fertile ground for writes Claudio Corbucci and Emanuela Rossi – who also directs - to explore a number of themes of such as female emasculation, misogyny, abuse and likely incest. The father is a pretty crude cut-out but serves the purpose of the film as he channels what could be seen as the failures of society and the church in its treatment of women with reliance on religion and manipulation, to the end.

As such the Binasco has a fairly one-dimensional character to play though he conveys a very unsettling, skin-crawling creepiness when he dances with Luce with Stella looking on - clearly having gone through this all before and having warned Luce against telling him about her period.

The three girls are excellent if maybe falling into the cliché of Aria too young to know what’s going on, Luce at an impressionable age; hanging on the words of her father to the end, and Stella gradually questioning everything, and growing in stature against father and with her sisters. The relationship within the three is entirely believable as they struggle to assimilate new knowledge and try to make sense of their situation.

The film is bleak; the tired interiors offer little light but Rossi does fantastic work with the shadows. But into this bleakness is a blast of sunlight when Stella starts to dance and the others join in a joyous interlude. Flashbacks and memories fill out the gaps in the tale which from what you have read so far will you will have picked up has elements of joy and tragedy.