WHY ? Because everything about Brando De Sica’s 1st feature film is outstanding. From the prodigal actors-centred direction through the inventive script, to the immersive photography & sound design, MIMÌ – IL PRINCIPE DELLE TENEBRE truly delivers “a cinematic spectacle of a new genre that makes an actor like me want to be on the lookout for upcoming Brando De Sica projects and audition for them”. That’s exactly what I first told the Italian director by way of introduction, at the cocktail party of the Paris première hosted by Diane Pernet at the Silencio-Des-Prés as A SHADED VIEW ON FASHION FILM satellite event.

Indeed, the relentless twists and turns of this “Neo-noir-magically-realistic-gore” story delving into the heart ache’s odyssey of an enamoured Elephant Man of the modern days does hit you like a satellite event. With unexpectedly playful camera view angles and movements, the film penetrates your orbits defied of the many expectations one might have about a genre that can often indulge into its own clichés with a lot of complacency, thus turning the art form into mere form of entertainment. Here you’re getting both: an art film inventing its own genre, to entertain you also in the way it consciously or unconsciously plays of the many references to the films cherished by past and new generations of cinephiles. Or maybe was it just me using the film as a projectional mirror of my own cinematic passions, fantasies, desires … ?

Beyond the deliberately-claimed references to the classics of horror, the first killing scene particularly intrigued me for the way it intelligently seemed to pull me in by mashing-up scenes written by Masters of the Seventh Art which had previously haunted worldwide audiences, such as the scene in David Lynch’s “Wild At Heart” in which Willem Dafoe strangles Laura Dern, or the scene of Nicholas Winding Refn’s “Neon Demon” in which Abbey Lee attacks Elle Fanning with a chipped mirror, all against a photographic background that seemed to draw inspiration from Dario Argento’s “Suspiria”.

De Sica makes you travel through the History of Cinema, humbly exemplifying that by getting inspired from the common source, you give back to the common source. Nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything is transformed. And the starting point of this original movie now offered for audiences to discover apparently derives, in De Sica’s own words, from one single image found in the 12th Tarot arcane: “LE PENDU” (“THE HANGMAN”).

In Alejandro Jodorowsky’s restored version of the Tarot of Marseille, this card often symbolises an individual made prisoner of a present situation, needing an upside-down outlook on life to open fresh perspectives and break free from haunting ties to the past. And that’s exactly the case of MIMÌ – THE PRINCE OF DARKNESS. (Logline) “Mimì is an orphaned adolescent with malformed feet who works in a Naples pizzeria. He encounters Carmilla, a young girl who believes she is a descendent of Count Dracula, on a fateful day. They decide to leave their society together.”

The couple of outcasts embodied by the two young prodigies Domenico Cuomo e Sara Ciocca (only 17 and 12 at the time of the shoot), embody the poetical archetype of misfits we all once were, are, or dreamt to become, for we all once craved to leave our societies. And this is why we decide to follow them all the way despite what can seem to be at first a narrative way too far out of reach for the too Cartesian, with some occasional lengths in two hours of film but that I understood only after were probably there purposely to better catch us off guard as the plot unraveled.

Undoubtedly, Brando De Sica perpetuates in his own cinematic language an estate running in the lineage of an esteemed family of filmmakers and actors. In his own words, “a director with an acting experience who genuinely loves actors by offering most of his time on set to them” definitely helps actor weave mystery, which is the precious yarn in which great characters are cloaked.