Fantastic Fest Review: THE EDITOR Goofs On Giallo
I’m a big advocate for going into a movie cold. If I know I’m going to see a film anyway, sometimes I won’t even watch a trailer beforehand. It allows a kind of joy of revelation and discovery to happen, and it’s made for some seriously rewarding viewing experiences.
But sometimes this tactic bites me in the ass. When I sat down to watch The Editor, all I knew was that it was a riff on Italian giallo films. I thought back to past Fantastic Fest films which boasted the same: the moody, artful Berberian Sound Studio, the lush and mysterious The Strange Colour Of Your Body’s Tears. I settled in, excited, for something of a piece with those films.
What I’m saying is that I didn’t realize The Editor was the Black Dynamite of giallo homages.
Rey Ciso (Adam Brooks) is a film editor who’s lost his hand in an accident, and when the cast and crew of his latest film are brutally murdered one by one, he’s the main suspect. Periods of lost time and unusual footage on his editing bench indicate he just might be guilty. Pursued by a detective (Matthew Kennedy) with a personal stake in the case, Rey sets out to discover who the real killer is - even if that means discovering he’s the culprit.
It’s a full-on parody, playing with the sights, sounds and conventions of giallo, with a dash of Quentin Dupieux-level absurdity thrown in. How much you’ll enjoy that particular cocktail is up to you. The humor is hit and miss: yes, it’s borderline amusing when Italian actors are poorly dubbed into English, but that’s not some endless font of laughter (several members of my audience disagreed). When The Editor moves past lazy spoofing and earns a joke, it’s a scream. In other places the humor shoots past the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker realm of farce and ends up in dream logic territory. Points must be given to the filmmakers for really nailing the look of a giallo cast (extra impressive in that the writers and directors are the guys playing the Italian stereotypes), and the scores of beautiful women in the film (except for Paz de la Huerta, bless) all have that authentic, wide-eyed, otherworldly sexiness so familiar to giallo fans. The score is pretty on point, and the crew is mostly successful at recreating the look of Italian horror when they try. And hey, Udo Kier!
The film’s third-act plunge into the realm of the surreal feels at times like an easy way out of tightening the narrative, and the movie is altogether too long for what amounts to an absurdist comedy sketch. But I can’t help but chalk a mixed review up to expectation mismanagement on my end, and in the name of fairness I’ll be watching The Editor again when I can. I just wish I’d watched a trailer ahead of time.
