The Girl in the Fog (2017)

The Girl in the Fog arrives from Italy in 2017, directed by Donato Carrisi from his own novel, and it performs the work of a psychological thriller with the patience of a man who has read a great many of them. A sixteen-year-old girl vanishes from Avechot, an Alpine village so insular that fog serves as both weather and civic policy. Inspector Vogel, played by Toni Servillo with the weary precision of a man disappointed by humanity since roughly 1994, stages a search for the cameras. Painter's overalls, a forest, a hungry press corps. The investigation becomes a television event, and the film's actual subject announces itself: the manufacture of public attention.

This is a story about media machinery, and it stops there. The screenplay holds no interest in the economics beneath the spectacle, no class argument, no systemic indictment beyond the obvious vanity of a detective who requires an audience. The village is white, the cast is white, and the film never turns to consider that fact, because it is not a film that considers facts of that kind. There are no queer characters, no feminist reading of the missing girl as anything but a prop in a man's career, no engagement with race, environment, body image, or neurological difference. The girl is a device. The fog is a device. The press is a device.

We are left with craft. Carrisi took the David di Donatello for best new director, and the film earns that modest honor through atmosphere and structure, not through sermonizing. It shows. It does not lecture. No lesson is appended to the final act, no plea issued on behalf of a cause. A viewer arriving in search of contemporary social instruction will find the cupboard bare, and the film seems untroubled by the emptiness. It is a procedural with cold weather and a colder protagonist, adapted from a book, content to be a book's adaptation. Nothing further is claimed. Nothing further is offered.