Lord Doesn’t Hate You – review

Director: Fabrizio La Monica

Release date: 2019

Contains spoilers

Entitled Dio non ti odia in the original Italian, the blurb for this film says, “A young girl contracts a rare and deadly disease. No one in the village can cure her, so the friar orders her to be removed from the community before she can infect everyone.” This is the basic story but the spoiler – of course, given the film is here – is that the film concerns vampires.

This film is very slow burn and, whilst it looks to the balance of good, evil and sacrifice, there is no discussion about such philosophical considerations, rather some quotes and space for the viewer to think. For instance, an intertitle at the head of the film asks “If God exists, why is there evil? And if he doesn’t, why is there good?”. The quote attributed to Boethius.

a father's eyes

The film does not name any character, so we start with a man – who I’ll refer to as the Father (Roberto Romano) – bloodied and tied to a stake. We get a voiceover from the daughter (Emilia Passalacqua) talking of a time when wolves came from the mountains into the village but she was not scared because her father was with her. We cut to her in bed, the local friar (Salvatore Nereo Salerno) telling her that she is sick; she doesn’t have symptoms yet but she will become a danger to the village. The only hope a healer in the mountains and her father will take her there.

Emilia Passalacqua as the daughter

The film then follows the trek through the mountains. The daughter is both terrified and confused as she doesn’t feel ill. The leaving of a doll on the outskirts of the village, which her deceased mother made for her, indicates leaving childhood behind. At one point they hear a twig snap and the father has her hide and shoots their pursuer – he turns out to be the son (Paolo Tinnirello) of a neighbour (Antonino Scaglione), The neighbour's son and the daughter were sweet on each other and he discovered what the village had conspired to do.

Ferdinando Gattuccio as the vampire

There is no illness. The village have a pact with a creature (Ferdinando Gattuccio), never called vampire but presenting as such, and they willingly sacrifice one of their number – we never discover how frequently, but it feels as though it is infrequent if the younger generation are unaware – to spare the rest. The daughter was chosen by the villagers because the father has two other children. Getting to the vampire takes about half the film and then we have the aftermath faced by the father, his family and his neighbour.

fangs

There isn’t much lore. The vampire lives in a cave, has a greyish complexion, long black nails, unnatural green eyes and fangs. It is implied he is able to be abroad by night only and also implied that he controls wolves. The girl observes that the valley with the cave is bereft of birdsong, heavy of atmosphere and the colours are less vivid. The vampire can make other vampires and we also get the ghost of an old woman more for a sense of unease than anything else. The film values atmosphere over narrative and condemns itself into a pretty plodding pace as there is little plot beyond that suggested. Even the deaths – of which there are a few – are mostly off screen. 5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.