Tag Archives: Metanarrative

Capsules

CAPSULE: CITY WIDE FEVER (2026)

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DIRECTED BY: Josh Heaps

FEATURING: Diletta Giuglielmi, Nancy Kimball, Hugo Alexander-Rose, Angelica Kim

PLOT: A film student discovers evidence of a forgotten Italian director and, in the course of making a documentary about him, gradually loses touch with reality.

Still from City Wide Fever (2026)

 

COMMENTS: Initial reports on City Wide Fever described it variously as a , a giallo tribute, and definitely not a giallo nor a tribute. The film’s strange tone must account for this confusion. IMDB classifies it as a horror comedy; though if there’s humor here, I suspect I’m not interpreting it as the director intended. The script attempts to walk the line between genuinely engaging with giallo tropes and simultaneously condemning them for offending contemporary sensibilities. Whether City Wide Fever is a send-up of the giallo resurgence or an honest homage (or both), it liberally takes from the genre its trademark ambiguity, stylization, and mood.

While wandering around New York City, Sam happens upon a USB drive in a gutter. She takes it home and finds a trove of files relating to Saturnino Barresi, who just happens to have directed a slew of giallo films, one of her favorite genres. Barresi apparently went missing, or stopped making films, under mysterious circumstances in the 1970s. His final film, City Wide Fever, was never completed. Though she’s never heard of him before, nor actually seen any of his movies, Sam decides to track him down and make a documentary about her search (a very film student thing to do, as the movie self-reflexively acknowledges).

Her quest takes her to the home of a creepy film professor, a creepy Times Square porn shop (where appears in a brief cameo), and a creepy Gowanus warehouse filled with mannequins (what else?), until she reaches the creepy house of a former giallo actress, before it all culminates in—her mother’s uptown apartment (?). Along the way, a masked knife-wielding killer (who else?) shows up to off Sam’s contacts and friends. Or is she just having nightmares, having succumbed to “the fever”?

The killer wears a variety of masks, many of them knit ski masks in bright colors, similar to Pussy Riot, also recalling masked serial killers from classic horror films. Red and blue lighting appears whenever Sam’s delusions and reality merge or fracture. Despite this, City Wide Fever never gets really weird. Even though Sam may be hallucinating some of the events depicted, they never stray too far from typical giallo violence, and only a few frames are outright surreal.

Perhaps it’s weirdest feature is the portrayal of Sam by two different actors, for reasons that remain unclear; this conceit could use the aid of more character development. All we know about Sam is her obsession with giallo. So, is she an American who imagines herself as Italian due to her fixation? Is she an Italian who imagines herself in the role of the amateur investigator, who is often a foreigner in Italian films? Or is this simply emblematic of the lack of narrative logic that’s repeatedly emphasized as a defining characteristic of these films (or maybe a nod to )?

Obviously limited by a low budget, the scenes shot with a cell phone actually look higher quality than the rest, which is shot on video. The documentary aspect of the narrative makes the visuals somewhat excusable. It looks exactly like the type of student film it purports to be.

Similar films from earlier in the century, like The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears and Berberian Sound Studio, interrogated giallo’s complexities through sophisticated dissections of imagery and sound. For those interested in a very 2020s take on the giallo, City Wide Fever may do the trick, though it really can’t compare to those earlier films. As other reviewers have noted, ‘s producer credit seems to be more an endorsement of Heaps’ directorial potential than anything else. Here’s hoping Heaps gets thrown more money for his next picture, and keeps heading off the beaten path.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a real oddity. On the surface, it’s a small DIY thriller that looks shot on the cheap, which already narrows down its appeal. But if you get on its wavelength over the course of its very brief 70 minutes (sans credits), you might even start to feel a small twinge of nostalgia. . . this movie tries to go for a surreal, artsy vibe that makes the protagonist question her own reality, though the attempt is hampered by a limited budget. “–Ernesto Zelaya Miñano, Screen Anarchy (contemporaneous)

City Wide Fever [Blu-ray]

City Wide Fever [Blu-ray]

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Capsules

CAPSULE: THE TEXTURE OF FALLING (2018)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY: Maria Allred

FEATURING: Julie Webb, Patrick Green, Maria Allred, Benjamin Farmer

PLOT: Some millennials with plenty of time and money skirt around different affairs with each other before it’s revealed that we’re watching a movie about some millennials with plenty of time and money who skirt around having different affairs with each other.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It pitches itself as “unlike any film that you’ve ever seen”. That is true: never have I seen something so bold in its combination of earnest pretentiousness and skull-sagging tedium.

COMMENTS: Recent experience suggests that among today’s millennialist youth, the trend of making movies that end up being about making movies is growing. Perhaps the would-be artistes grew up watching them and thought, erroneously, “That looks easy. I bet I can make something that impressive.” Flustered as I am at this moment, I just had the horrible realization that I wish I had just re-watched Paris Is Us instead of this one—and trust you me, I am fully aware of the ramifications of that errant thought.

The drama begins in Portland, Oregon—definitely not Seattle, Washington. Louisa (Julie Webb) is an aspiring film-maker and “love-skeptic” who finds herself, against her will, falling for quiet-but-blandly-hot pianist-composer, Luke (Patrick Green). In a parallel story, not-so-happy-with-his-wife Mike (Benjamin Farmer), an architect, is beginning a bondage-lite affair with a woman whose character was so hard to pin down I can only confidently refer to her by the descriptor “Blondie” (Maria Allred). As love chatter goes back and forth and up and down, each of the leads makes various compromises (?) and claws blindly toward an actual plot.

On at least two occasions I wrote in my notebook, “Big question: is this going anywhere?” And this was twice during a movie lasting a blip of an hour and a quarter. While watching various characters I had absolutely no interest in putz around and make emotional and social idiots of themselves, I was nearly relieved to find that I was watching one of them there “movie” movies. Turns out Louisa is writing a script, and lifting her lines from her interactions with Luke. But wait! No, it turns out that she’s actually fallen for the moody pianist (who is married, with children) on whom she’s basing a character. But wait! Louisa is just the role played by a character who seems to be an assistant to the real driving force behind this mess.

Maria Allred: I understand that making a movie is a very difficult undertaking. Furthermore, that your credits list includes, but is not limited to, director, writer, editor, producer, costumes, casting, designer, and art department forces me, despite my complete dismissiveness, to give you some respect. But perhaps you should take on a lighter workload next time. The Texture of Falling is, technically, a well put-together movie. But it is, almost objectively, a boring mass of bad dialogue, superfluous meta-twists, and somnolent acting. If your next Kick-Starter[efn_note]Kickstarter was mentioned on no fewer than 3 occasions.[/efn_note] campaign is for a movie with an actual plot, consider me on the hook for at least a one-hundred dollar donation.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“How are these people connected? What’s real and what’s fantasy? But again, I run the risk of giving the impression that The Texture of Falling is compelling, which it is not. It’s 74 minutes of mediocre actors giving meek, low-energy performances while reciting clumsily written, faux-philosophical dialogue.” –Eric D. Schneider, Portland Mercury (contemporaneous)