After directing "Between Us" (an episode alongside Domiziano Cristopharo's "Chromophobia" in Shock - My Abstraction of Death), young director Alessandro Redaelli directs. Pray for Diamonds, an interesting short just 20 minutes long with an engaging retro style.
The film is divided into a prologue and three segments (The First Experiment, Second Try and The Last Sacrifice) whose titles are accompanied on either side by two upside-down crosses, symbols that suggest the anti-Christian nature of the short film.
In the leading role once again Massimo Onorato, already seen and appreciated in Redaelli's aforementioned film work.
Onorato and Francesca Ghezzi play a couple living isolated and in poverty inside a trailer where she practices strange experiments.
A filthy trailer is thus the claustrophobic location where the protagonist is intent on performing strange magical rituals evoking the evil one. The abundance of details of the location and the gestures performed by the witch, as well as her always dirty hands and the way she prepares food (it even seems possible to smell the unpleasant odor of fish) or recipes for rituals, frame a contaminated environment, blighted by poor hygiene (the outdoor sequences give the spectacle oxygen) but above all steeped in human squalor and evil.
A perfectly realized picture in which the three segments designating the evolution of the experiments unfold (note the peculiarity of the result of the second attempt by Pietro D'Asta) and also of the situation in which, among other things, the good performance of the protagonists emerges.
Apart from a couple of sequences that are not fully satisfactory (I am referring to the "magical" outdoor encounter between the two girls) and the fight inside the trailer, Pray for Diamonds is a well-directed, praiseworthy, charming and engaging short film that gives unforgettable shots (such as the one of the couple walking toward the lens: he while dragging "something" and she armed with an axe) but also manages to convey a certain bleakness... because in this work it is the images, the play of the protagonists' gazes, their gestures, their bodies that speak.
In addition to directing, promising director Alessandro Redaelli, currently working with "Alone" (one of the segments of Poern) and "Re Peste" (P.O.E. 3 Pieces Of Eldritch), he co-wrote the screenplay with Ruggero Melis (who also handled the original soundtrack) and the production with Daniele Fagone (associate producers: Domiziano Cristopharo, Ruggero Melis and Pietro D'Asta). Special effects, on the other hand, are by Pietro D'Asta.
In the cast Massimo Onorato and Francesca Ghezzi are accompanied by Francesca Germini, Federico Toniolo and Davide Cazzani.
