Katabasis
2023 · 6m · Denmark
Directed by Nicole Di Fresco
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, mythic
In denial of his grandma's death, a young boy descends into the underworld in search of her. A bittersweet journey through the land of the dead.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Okay, so it's Orpheus meets grief processing—premise-wise, not exactly radical—but Di Fresco refuses to make the underworld a spectacle, which is almost a subversion by restraint; the real move is that the film trusts the mythic structure to do the emotional work instead of undermining it.
A formally precise descent that knows its lineage (Ovid, yes, but also contemporary elegiac cinema) and executes it with remarkable control—the pacing, the color palette, the restraint in what it shows versus what it suggests all speak to a filmmaker thinking in images and duration, not just sentiment.
The singular choice here is the decision to stay at the boy's eye level throughout the underworld sequences, which transforms what could've been a grandiose fantasy spectacle into something intimate and claustrophobic; that one framing commitment is what makes the grief feel earned rather than performed.