Killer in red
2017 · 13m · Italia
Directed by Paolo Sorrentino
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
While waiting in a bar for his date to arrive, a man imagines himself as a bartender in the 1980s. His fantasy unfolds in neo-noir style as he waits.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Sorrentino doing a 13-minute daydream noir is exactly the kind of high-low genre play that feels designed by committee — a prestige director checking the 'experimental' box without actually breaking anything.
A formally assured descent into pastiche that demonstrates Sorrentino's command of visual language and tonal register; the film's architecture—present-day bar framing a fully realized 1980s fantasy—sits squarely in the lineage of metanarrative cinema that rewards repeated viewing.
The masterstroke is the color grading shift: that precise moment the fantasy takes hold and the palette bleeds into synthetic 80s warmth is where Sorrentino commits to the conceit rather than merely illustrating it.