re:mote voices

Title: Superstition

Cast: Sienna Guillory, Mark Strong, David Warner, Charlotte Rampling, Alice Krige, Frances Barber, Derek de Lint

Director: Kenneth Hope

An English girl comes home from school one day to find her home on fire. Four years pass and now a 19-year-old, she leaves England behind her. Moving to Italy, she takes on the job of nanny for a warring couple. However, despite her attempts to distance herself from her past, tragedy strikes when the baby she is looking after dies in a fire. Caught up in the Italian legal system she is accused of murder. Was it arson, the press don’t think so, accusing her of being a witch, and certainly some of the events surrounding the girl might suggest something strange is going on.

Superstition is a funny little British film, marked by some dramatic detail, which verges at times on being over the top. Superstition plays very much as being a straight drama, but it is a thin line it walks between atmosphere and absurd – are the techniques effect or excess? The fact that the film is “set” in Italy doesn’t help – since other than character names there isn’t the slightest sense that there is anything Italian about the piece. A cast of British actors, with very much English accents, in a film that is shot in Belgium and the Netherlands.

If you can suspend belief sufficiently then you can see how Superstition could have worked. However, for me, I just can’t get over the film’s flaws enough to particularly convinced by Superstition.