PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 4/23/04)


In Kill Bill—Vol. 2, Quentin Tarantino treats his audiences to every nerve-wracking second as the Bride gets buried alive. We witness each nail as it's driven into Uma Thurman's plywood coffin, and then, after the screen goes black, we hear the sound of shoveled dirt drowning out her boxed-in breathing. It's the most terrifying, claustrophobic scene of either Kill Bill film, and yet, it's nothing compared with the more psychological take on premature burial in director Gabriele Salvatores's thriller I'm Not Scared.

To reveal who or what lies buried beneath the Italian wheat fields would spoil the movie. Besides, it's ultimately not the entombed creature's identity, but the way he imagines his own existence that provides the film's biggest surprise. Deprived of light, cut off from the world, and forced to live in a dank underground burrow, the unlucky soul thinks he's died and gone to heaven. Or perhaps hell . . . until a young boy stumbles across his cave.

Whether tumbling through endless fields or eavesdropping on grown-up conversations from behind a cracked door, I'm Not Scared unfolds entirely through the eyes of children (and what a talented cast of youngsters it took to pull this off). Salvatores's approach reminded me a bit of Hellboy director Guillermo del Toro's intimate Spanish ghost story, The Devil's Backbone. Both films share a supernatural undercurrent, although a second major plot twist brings the former back to the realm of the real, revealing the film as a brilliant new take on the kind of meat-grinder material constantly being explored by Italy's best (and worst) shock-horror directors.

Unlike Kill Bill, I'm Not Scared isn't interested in paying homage to Italian exploitation classics. Instead, it offers a fresh, stylish, and considerably more intelligent treatment of familiar genre material. Think of how M. Night Shyamalan redefined the ghost story (The Sixth Sense), the superhero creation myth (Unbreakable), and the alien-invasion epic (Signs)—and you may get a sense of the genius behind this fascinating new horror film.

—Peter Debruge