Una Volta

The scouts

It's a ghost story that doesn't know if it's haunting the past or the future — which should be annoying, but Boon leans into the vertigo instead of resolving it, and that refusal to pick a lane is exactly the kind of formally weird choice that makes consensus critics squirm.

Boon situates this film in the lineage of European art-horror and folk-psychological cinema — the visual language recalls both German Romantic painting and the melancholic disorientation of Tarkovsky — and the editing rhythm shows real command of how to pace dread without conventional genre scaffolding.

The single decision that transforms this from competent to singular is the sound design: Boon layers the ambient Italian landscape with what sounds like temporal distortion — wind that shouldn't exist, voices that don't sync to image — and that one choice does the heavy lifting for an 8-minute budget that clearly had none to spare.