Sometimes you can watch a film that is ambitious enough to make you overlook a variety of flaws. It can be easy to remember that not everyone has the budget and resources to get their vision onscreen in the way they would prefer. But when the biggest flaw is the script, and it feels so sorely misjudged, then it’s hard to look beyond the weaker aspects.
Anja is essentially the tale of a lonely man named Andrej (Roberto Caccavo) and an encounter with the titular young woman (Larthia Galli Nannini) that leads him into a criminal underworld as he tries to figure out a mystery that either connects directly to Anja or connects directly to his own past.
Directors Pablo Benedetti and Paolo Martini, working from a script co-written by Martini and Giuseppe Calandriello, show a disappointing lack of experience and imagination here. They know the tropes they want to work around, they know the style they want to emulate, but they cannot do anything with the material that feels interesting or worthwhile. And the mystery at the heart of it all feels like a mishandled MacGuffin. I might be doing everyone involved a disservice, but this feels at times like a failed attempt to emulate David Lynch without really understanding his skillset.
The cast are fine, arguably better than the material deserves. Caccavo makes for a perfect male lead, slightly naive as he gets himself entangled in something that quickly spirals into a deadly predicament. Nannini looks the part, and is shown in a state of vulnerability that may or may not be accurate, but is certainly enough to motivate our “hero” anyway. Désirée Georgetti and Samuele Batistoni are two other main characters, both potentially manipulating the situation to solve a problem of their own.
I really wanted to like this, and the early scenes pointed at a film that was going to at least deliver what most would expect from this kind of thing, but it soon starts to go downhill, and keeps sliding further and further towards a final scene that it’s almost impossible to care about. The whole thing ends up being an unenjoyable mess, although there’s at least a consistency in the dark visual style used throughout that hints at better things to come from those behind the camera when they have better material to work with.
3/10
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