Custodes – review

Directors: Lea Borniotto, Vera Borniotto & Edoardo Nervi

Release date: 2021

Contains spoilers

This is an Italian film that is available for stream on Amazon and it is a difficult one to evaluate, to be honest. It meanders slowly through its length but does manage to offer some good imagery and, as you will have deduced given this review, there is a vampiric aspect to it. In many respects it is more a mood piece than anything else and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The joins, unfortunately, do show but as you’ll see I was quite taken with it.

Lorenzo Crovetto as Dante

The movie starts with Ada (Lea Borniotto) walking through a forested area – her case cumbersome. She has received a letter from her cousin Umberto (Edoardo Nervi) who apologises, in the first instance, for the fact that his father had disinherited her and that he never sought her out before this point. He had checked one of the properties he had inherited – expecting it to be a wreck – but found it in (fairly) good shape, looked after by caretaker Dante (Lorenzo Crovetto). He wants to employ her to appraise the books, parchments and other valuables.

Ada screaming

She gets to the property and is met by a rifle wielding man – after establishing that she is Umberto’s cousin he reveals he is Dante and leads her to the mansion. He installs her in a room – opposite the one working bathroom. He, himself, does not live in the house (indicating an adjacent building) and leaves her to it. Strangeness begins on the first night – with her thinking she hears someone walking downstairs. The oddity is her reaction – locking herself in her room, rather than either investigating or getting out of there.

dancing in dreams

Be that as it may, a mist fills the room and her dreams are filled with strangeness and an oddly moving women (Vera Borniotto). There is much play with red lighting in the film (for reasons I’ll get to). Again, a strange aspect is that Ada doesn’t seem to notice (when the lighting occurs during waking hours) despite a red light wash flooding behind her. Anyway, she does notice a bruise on her inner arm when she wakes and, going down to a breakfast Dante has provided, mentions that she thinks it an insect bite (concerned about poison) and that she noticed blood outside her door. He suggests he must have cut himself when in the attic.

the mask of Arev

Its difficult to give a blow-by-blow as it is mostly Ada meandering. She finds a strange collage piece that Dante denies knowledge of and eventually some writings by the Baron Malatesta – a previous owner of the estate – his writings matched with black and white film footage. He mentions finding artefacts belonging to the Red World (hence the importance of the red light) – firstly the bones gate (the collage) that is a passageway to that place, home of Cthonic deities. The baron’s wife Lucilla – the figure in Ada’s dream – was obsessed with eternal life and so was happy when they found the mask of Arev, the third queen of the Red World (the mask has a rather cat like design). Arev offered eternal life (and we see Lucilla dancing in a way described as pagan).

a glimpse of Lucilla

Eventually the Baron found a dead maid, drained of blood and went to a curate – but he was a fan of the inquisition and tortured Lucilla with fire. She survived, but we see her swathed in bandages and the Baron describes her soul as dying. She called out to the shadows of the Red World – who ask for blood and, we discover, Lucilla is still there, harvesting blood provided by the Baron (who describes himself as not alive but unable to die – his life dependent on her existence). Presumably she is able to produce the mist and she definitely has set her eyes on Ada (or, more accurately, her blood). Occasionally Ada might catch a glimpse of Lucilla in a reflective surface.

the bones gate

So it is blood for eternal life (hence calling this vampiric) but we don’t see the context – is it a blood sacrifice or imbibing the blood. Is it Lucilla herself who imbibes it (we see, in the subs, a mention of the sound of her eating flesh and bones – presumably of animal) or one of the shadows from the Red World or even Arev herself? That said we see little of anything really – and whilst a little can go a long way, when it comes to gore, this has nothing at all and it is one of the film’s failings. Some visceral moments might have helped the meandering pacing. However, despite this, I was rather taken with the film. I enjoyed it more than I suspect I should have. 5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK