Alessio Liguori’s film Lost is released

Alessio Liguori’s film Lost (The Boat, 2022) is released. Having looked at it, Mikhail Trofimenkov cried over the ruins of the once great Italian school of horror and thrillers.

Nine violent deaths plus two previous corpses per hour and a half of screen time for Italian genre cinema is the average statistical norm established back in the 1960s by the great Mario Bava and Dario Argento. Murder weapons should also be as diverse as possible within the framework of national tradition. And here Liguori does not deny himself anything: a bullet, poison, a knife, a harpoon, drowning in the Mediterranean depths, finally. Old-school Italians liked to start films with scenes of some long-ago atrocity involving children. So in Liguori’s prologue there is a vague accident in which two kids were injured.

But unlike the films of old, this dance of death is surprisingly tedious and boring, the script is sloppy, and the characters are so inexpressive that you even get confused about their names. The screenplay is all the more amazing because Liguori, without bothering himself too much, chose Agatha Christie’s great novel “Ten Little Indians” as a matrix. Only this is not happening on a desert island, but on an uncontrollable superyacht.

Three successful couples go on a pleasure trip: Enrico and Martina, Flavio and Elena, Federico and Claudia. Enrico has a birthday and a failed business experience. Martina worked in a bar and wears a lot of rings. Flavio is bald, Elena is a brunette with nightmares that are never explained to the audience. Federico wears a red shirt and makes horror films, “where evil always wins,” and Claudia is the star of either his films or Instagram. There is nothing more to say about them.

Having drunk, smoked and danced literally until they dropped in honor of Enrico, the heroes come to their senses on a yacht drifting in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. Okay, let’s say that after a few hours of drifting they ended up in such a remote corner where “only sharks and smugglers” meet – not the Mariana Trench, tea. It’s more difficult to imagine that during their alcohol-drug session, a certain murderer managed to single-handedly break their entire control system and desalination plant, steal anchors, and all supplies of food, water and gasoline. Not to mention telephones, walkie-talkies, flare guns and a life raft.

Oh yes, he also deprived the unfortunate people of their coffee supplies. And even before the party started, it was mentioned that all the kitchen knives had disappeared from the yacht. When it comes to the final bloody battle, knives somehow form on their own in the hands of its participants. For such contempt for detail, any director should be kicked out of the ranks of genre film makers with a wolf ticket.

In exchange, the murderer left the unfortunates a walkie-talkie, through which he mockingly communicates with them, calls himself “God’s justice,” utters platitudes like “poverty awakens the worst feelings in people,” and, it seems, intends, as would be logical in Christie’s universe, to reveal the shameful secrets of everyone out of six. Enrico, for example, embezzled one and a half million euros that friends lent him to build a hotel in Kenya. And Flavio slept with Claudia, which, of course, is very offensive for Federico, but does not in any way lead to a mass murder, to which everything is leading.

However, it gradually becomes clear that the villain personally has claims against only two of the six passengers, that is, not even two, but one and also the father of another character. And the rest, therefore, get in the way. The director simply “writes them off as battle losses,” which not only dismantles, but collapses the entire scenario structure, which seemed initially sophisticated.

The villain shows his face to the movie camera too early; it would be better if it remained in the shadows longer. The fact is that this is the face of a petty frustrated gopnik, a client of orphanages and correctional institutions. Meanwhile, the alleged circumstances give every reason to believe that we are dealing with a criminal of the level of Professor Moriarty. In order to find out the details of Enrico’s financial transactions, introduce his man into a close circle of friends, write down sexual incriminating evidence on Flavio and ultimately turn an exclusive yacht into a helpless remnant, remarkable intelligence is required. At the same time, as it turns out, this “superbrain” also made a mistake about who to take revenge on, after which he burst into tears bitterly.

It can be assumed that Liguori identifies himself with Federico: it’s not for nothing that he inserted a horror film director into the picture. There really are similarities between them. In Liguori, as in Federico, “evil triumphs” – only this evil of serene and merciless hackwork.