‘The American Backyard’: A Surreal and Unsettling Italian Gothic Thriller [FrightFest Glasgow 2025 Review]
Meandering, novelistic, and purposefully old-fashioned, the latest film from 86-year-old director Pupi Avati infuses morbid noir mystery with a touch of surreal absurdity. Best known for the classic giallo horror movies The House with Laughing Windows (1976) and Zeder (1983), Avati’s prolific career spans numerous genres including comedy and romance. Here he turns his eye to a peculiar kind of historical thriller, opening in postwar Italy. Filmed in black and white, The American Backyard takes us to Iowa (hence the somewhat puzzling title) and then back to Italy, for a winding gothic yarn that’s loosely structured around a young man’s search for a missing woman.
The protagonist Lui (Filippo Scotti) is a thoughtful loner who moves from Italy to the US in order to write a book. In his unlikely new home in the Iowa suburbs, he soon befriends his neighbor, an elderly woman named Flora (Rita Tushingham) whom he meets after hearing her screaming next door. She’s grieving the loss of her younger daughter Barbara (Mildred Gustafsson), an Army nurse who went missing sometime during the war. Since then Flora has become obsessed with finding out what happened, growing to resent her older daughter Arianna (Morena Gentile), whom she perceives as an undeserving rival to Barbara’s memory.
By coincidence, Lui once met Barbara himself, in a brief but memorable encounter that caused him to fall in love at first sight. After exchanging a couple of polite sentences in a barber’s shop, Barbara went blithely on her way while Lui sat weeping in silence, changed forever by the experience. (In case you haven’t already guessed, this tale is not grounded in realism.)
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Haunted by images of the beautiful Barbara, Lui decides to investigate her disappearance. Worryingly, her time in Italy overlapped with a notorious serial killer who murdered and mutilated several young women—a storyline inspired by the real-life “Monster of Florence,” whose crimes you may recognize from the Hannibal franchise.
Lui’s haphazard investigation incorporates hallucinatory clues and coded literary messages, guiding him toward some satisfyingly grotesque moments in the second act. Filippo Scotti’s performance is a crucial factor here, consistently curious and sensitive as the film’s tone swings from florid intensity to offbeat crime drama.
I’ve seen a few modern black-and-white movies that try to recreate a vintage aesthetic, most recently David Fincher’s disappointing Mank. Avati doesn’t fully attempt this kind of pastiche, yet at times it really does feel like you’re watching a film from another era—in part due to The American Backyard’s admittedly less-than-feminist noir premise.
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Apparently, this film earned a rather negative reception following its premiere at the Venice Film Festival, but I found myself swept up in its dreamlike atmosphere and strikingly weird plot. Despite its flaws—most obviously a couple of bad actors in the supporting cast, one of whom is clumsily and distractingly dubbed—The American Backyard has far too much personality to write off. Reveling in its melodramatic mid-century score (so much theremin!), it’s full of idiosyncratic characters and memorable imagery, with Lui as a charmingly naive protagonist for such a dark story.
The American Backyard is best enjoyed if you let go of the belief that characters and their motivations need to make rational sense. One film that springs to mind here is the 1944 noir Laura, whose titular femme fatale is already dead at the start of the story. The detective protagonist manages to fall in love with her while investigating her murder, despite never having met her in life. We’re expected to accept a romance where one half of the couple is unstable enough to fall for a dead woman, and the other is so fascinating that she can apparently seduce someone from beyond the grave. The American Backyard’s Barbara is even more enigmatic and her suitor often seems detached from reality, to the point where their connection bears hints of the supernatural.
One of the most unusual films I’ve seen this year, The American Backyard is determined to avoid being pinned down to one mood or genre. It’s strange and disturbing and occasionally ridiculous, capturing the gloom of early noir without feeling like an outright imitation. If you’re open to some unpredictable storytelling choices that lean more toward atmosphere and emotion than logic, it makes for rewarding viewing.
Summary
Meandering, novelistic and purposefully old-fashioned, the latest film from 86-year-old director Pupi Avati infuses morbid noir mystery with a touch of surreal absurdity.
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