Don’t hang up. The film review

Freely inspired by the novel of the same name by Alessandra Montrucchio, despite some narrative uncertainty it is a happy excursion into the genre with an excellent performance by Barbara Ronchi. From Biografilm

All in one night. Rome, 28 March 2020 in full lockdown. Irene’s phone rings. The one calling her is Pietro, her ex, who she hasn’t heard from since they broke up, seven months before her. She wants to hang up but the man’s confused words alarm her. She therefore decides to travel, towards Santa Marinella, to understand what is happening.

One immediately thinks of Tom Hardy in Locke, but the figure of the protagonist is instead particularly original in the way in which she transforms into a ‘creature of the night’ in the midst of the pandemic. Also produced by Manetti Bros., Don’t hang up it is a happy foray into sentimental noir despite some narrative uncertainty, especially in the moment in which Irene is stopped by two officers at the service station and in the ending. The dark dimension with the deserted streets had already characterized it All my nightsManfredi Lucibello’s feature film debut, but I respect that film made five years ago Don’t hang up it is a decisive step forward for the director. Thanks to the remarkable performance of Barbara Ronchi – who is proving more and more to be one of the best actresses in Italian cinema today – Lucibello’s film plays on the continuous gap between action and dialogue, where the former seems to interrupt, or rather suspend, when the conversations on the telephone between Pietro and Irene come to the foreground. The imaginary flashback of their life flows there: the illusion of happiness, the house by the sea, Geneva. Everything flows in the time of memory. The regret, however, is replaced by a tension expertly constructed with attention to details that can become decisive: the fall of sleep, the tunnel where the signal can be lost, the journey without documents and money.

Freely inspired by the novel of the same name by Alessandra Montrucchio, Don’t hang up it’s proof that you just need the right intuition and a good idea to make a good film. It has the soul of American independent cinema but also follows the artisanal lesson of filmmakers like Badham (Minutes counted) and Donner (Only 2 hours) to compress the action without dispersing it into unnecessary details. For much of the film’s 92 minutes there is only one character on screen. Claudio Santamaria’s voice/body is above all the projection of a memory (as in the photos on WhatsApp) while few occasional encounters have the effect of a continuous hallucination. Don’t hang up It thus becomes the example of a road movie under Covid that finally begins to enter the cinematic imagination as an effective and fully functional setting for the story.