Fridae

In yet another role as a silently grieving man, Colin Firth plays a father of two lovely daughters who just got his wife killed in a road accident while playing a silly guessing game where they cover each other’s eyes. Don’t ask me who would play that kind of game on a car trip, but apparently the circumstances of the tragedy are so humiliating or personally upsetting that Firth uproots the entire family to the old city of Genova, where he can immerse himself in work as a professor of sociology, get wooed by his college flame (played by an over-eager Catherine Keener), while overlooking the fact that daughter #1 experiences her sexual awakening while checking out the boys at the beach and daughter #2 makes creepy charcoal drawings of her dead mother while seeing her apparition at her bedside every night...

The best way to describe A Summer in Genova is a typical ‘family coming to terms with tragedy’ drama married to a slightly menacing ‘family in trouble... maybe supernatural trouble!’ thriller. But that could be somewhat misleading despite the escalating unease that Michael Winterbottom’s direction and script create via little crises throughout the film.

Instead, I believe the most apt comparison would involve putting A Summer in Genova and James Wan’s Insidious side by side while refracted by Leo Tolstoy’s aphorism about unhappy families. Wan’s horror flick is what you get if you start off with an unhappy family and attribute its domestic angst to malicious supernatural causes. Winterbottom’s quietly menacing drama is what you get if you start off with an unhappy family and attribute what appears to be malicious supernatural hauntings to the family’s own domestic angst.

Whether as a touching domestic drama or a supernatural film or both, A Summer in Genova works because of Winterbottom’s legendary docu-drama approach to storytelling, which makes domestic grief feel ever slightly more believable and the sense of impending additional tragedies (supernatural or otherwise) ever more palpable in a way directors of the horror mockumentary genre have consistently failed to achieve.