Italy, 2009

directed by Giuseppe Capotondi

I watch movies for the same reason I read books because I like stories. And what I like most when watching/reading a story is to be surprised. That is why I don’t like movies that are predictable. The ones you think you have already seen after watching the trailer. Or even worse after reading the title. Snakes on a Plane anybody?

The Double Hour is certainly not predictable. A mystery, a psychological thriller, a love story, all of the above?

The story starts with a shocking suicide and ends pretty. Or maybe not. It’s that kind of movie.

The protagonist is Sonia (Ludovica Rampoldi) an Slovenian emigrant who works as a maid in a posh hotel in Turin and Guido (Alessandro Fabbri), an ex-cop she meets in a speed-dating event. They go out together a couple of times, then he takes her to his workplace, an impressive mansion where he works as a security guard. That is when things go wrong. There is a robbery, a gun is shot and the camera goes blank.

From then on the story goes psychologically strange as unexplainable things happen, and the story twists and turns keeping the viewer guessing.

The plot is complex but not confusing if you pay attention, and all fits neatly at the end, even if the last frame is not the picture you expected. Most probably not what Sonia herself wanted. But it makes sense within the movie.

As for the title, The Double Hour, it refers to those times that, like 23:23, the time the protagonists say good-bye the night they first meet, have a double number when read in digital.

Someone dear to Guido believed these double hours were lucky, he tells Sonia “and you are supposed to make a wish, like you would when you see a shooting star.”

“Does it work?” Sonia asks.

“No,” says the pragmatic Guido.

But then, he goes ahead and makes his wish.

And we get our movie.

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