Bryan Miller
There’s more than one way to lose a movie. Historically it meant no more surviving prints of some film that exists now only as mentions in newspaper archives and memoirs, or perhaps a smattering of set photography and a tantalizing one-sheet. The era of streaming and (sometimes false) abundance, though, has made a quieter, more pernicious disappearance more common: the movie missing in plain sight, not so much a needle lost in a haystack as a needle lost in a stack of needles. Two films, lost in their own different ways, have recently resurfaced, and the timing couldn’t be better. Despite being separated by an ocean and half a decade, 1952’s If I Should Die Before I Wake and 2003’s I’m Not Scared make for a dream double feature of coming-of-age thrillers.
Both films feature a reluctant kid detective compelled to solve the case of a missing child, but it’s the manner and meaning behind the disappearances that define their different conceptions of good and evil. Just as with the movies themselves, there’s more than one way for a child to get lost. The Criterion Channel recently added If I Should Die Before I Wake, a 1952 noir from Argentina that was nearly lost before the restoration of a lone surviving print with embedded English subtitles. The ascensor pitch for this dark little Spanish-language gem would be, “What if Antoine from Truffaut’s The 400 Blows had to catch the child killer from Fritz Lang’s M?”
Remarkably, If I Should Die Before I Wake mostly lives up to this description. At just over 70 minutes, it’s a drum-tight dread machine, steeped in black-and-white foreboding. Director Carlos Hugo Christensen and writer Alejandro Casona adapt a Cornell Woolrich story—one of three they collaborated on—in which young Nestor Zavarce plays Lucio, the rebellious teenage son of a police inspector. Lucio is the class clown, so no one takes him seriously when he claims to have information about the identity of a mystery man killing local school children. When Lucio suspects the killer has set his sights on yet another classmate, the boy must become the crimefighter his own father is failing to be, putting himself directly in the path of the murderer.
If I Should Die Before I Wake is so taut and so deliciously ominous you want to restart it again as soon as it’s over. It immediately brought to mind I’m Not Scared, an Italian crime thriller from 2003 that shares much in common with If I Should Die Before I Wake’s reluctant kid-detective plot. I’m Not Scared was by no means obscure—I caught it at the Landmark Theater on the North side of Chicago in 2003, when it got an American arthouse release, and it froze me in my chair. Afterwards, I tracked down the Niccolo Ammaniti novel on which it was based. But in the subsequent two decades of me enthusiastically blabbering about movies with anyone kind enough to listen or sick enough to sympathize, I don’t think I’ve spoken with a single person who remembers this one. It’s been logged a slim but respectable 13,000 times (and counting) on Letterboxd, yet it seems lost in the conversation among people who would absolutely fall for its dark charms.
I’m Not Scared falls into that phantom zone where so many older films disappear—not obscure enough to qualify as a significant rediscovery, but not part of a trend or a filmography that keeps it in the cultural conversation. I was thrilled, then, to find that it’s still findable, available on streaming and even receiving a limited Blu-Ray release in 2024. That film’s kid hero, Michele (Giuseppe Cristiano), is nine years old, a bit younger and more circumspect than If I Should Die Before I Wake’s affable miscreant. Michele lives in a tiny village in Southern Italy that consists of a handful of buildings and just five families. The poverty is as pervasive as the noonday sun that seems to bleach everything in sight to a dry yellow. Michele and the other children spend their summer days riding bikes and playing games in the endless wheat fields that surround their cloistered, airless homes.
During a solo adventure to an abandoned house beyond the edge of what passes for town, Michele makes a startling discovery. There’s a hole in the ground covered by a sheet of corrugated metal. Inside the hole is a boy his own age, filthy and manacled by a heavy ankle chain. Michele is confounded by what he’s seen. He’s at an age where fantasy and reality are still entangled, and he worries he’ll be in trouble—with his parents for venturing too far from town and with his friends for leaving them out of his discovery. The boy in the pit, starving and confused, is similarly delusional, in his case believing himself to be dead and in purgatory. (“I’m dead in a hole. My mother is dead in a hole. We’re all dead in a hole.”) It’s deeply disconcerting to watch Michele treat him more like a favored pet than a person.
The dramatic tension of the first half of the film—will the two boys be able to break out of their respective fantasies to accept the grave reality of the situation?—gives way to a simpler, starker dilemma: Who put Michele’s new friend in the pit? The town is so small as to present a slightly larger version of a locked room fit for a mystery. The list of suspects encompasses everyone Michele knows. There’s the volatile delinquent older brother of one of Michele’s young cohorts, as well as a few other potentially untrustworthy parental figures. Michele’s own father is a mercurial long-haul truck driver who is perhaps cajoled into letting a mustachioed man from Northern Italy sleep at the family’s house, in the bed right next to Michele.
I’m Not Scared is literally a very bright film—the sun seems inescapable—but pitch-black in its sensibilities. Director Gabriele Salvatores and screenwriter Francesca Marciano hew closely to Ammaniti’s novel, which is as potent and scorching as a shot of grappa. You can read it in the time in would take you to watch the movie twice, but you’ll likely be sitting in stunned silence for a while after. The filmmakers can’t quite bring themselves to keep the ending perfectly intact; it’s not so much flinching as showing the audience a modicum of mercy.
Still, the result is a truly harrowing crime film squirming beneath the skin of a macabre coming of age story. Salvatores’ direction doesn’t quite match the level of Ammaniti’s savagely concise storytelling, which is probably I’m Not Scared’s greatest shortcoming. In particular, the scenes set in the pit look like they were lit for a Netflix original. Salvatores is more comfortable with the sunny panoramas of provincial Southern Italy, although he’s got a few wonderfully nasty tricks up his sleeve—most notably, one truly stunning jump scare, as well as an unforgettable image of Michele waking from a blow to the head, with ants crawling around his blinking eyes.
To say any more about I’m Not Scared’s plot twists would be sinful spoilerism, but it echoes If I Should Die Before I Wake in such resonant ways as to almost demand a double feature. In terms of pure plot, they’re so similar as to almost run parallel, and they’re both focused on the concept of evil, but it’s in their conception of evil where they significantly diverge.
If I Should Die Before I Wake has a simpler, more childlike conception of good and evil—fitting given that it’s explicitly framed in the opening narration as a kind of modern-day fairy tale. Lucio will even crib a trick from Hansel and Gretel in the climax. That fairy-tale framework is embellished with dramatic flourishes far too intense for the grammar-school set. An escape scene featuring the ill-timed arrival of a passing train is as agonizing any classic Hitchcock gag, and the movie’s brief foray into surrealism during a dream sequence both predates and predicts some of David Lynch’s most harrowing imagery. Yet there remains throughout the film a sense that, though this innocence can be lost, it can also be preserved. (It’s notable that the character of the killer is listed in the credits as “The Corrupter.”)
I’m Not Scared, however, is far more skeptical of this innocence—not just whether it can be preserved in any way, but whether it ever existed at all. There’s more than a trace of sadism among Michele’s kid cohort, as evidenced early on in a scene where he intervenes when a girl is being bullied. But Salvatores, echoing the Ammaniti source text, suggests that same darkness within Michele when he discovers the boy in the hole. His unwillingness to seek help immediately isn’t merely the product of childishness; he clearly enjoys some part of his position at the top of this makeshift dungeon. He might not be responsible for the abduction, but he seems to enjoy play-acting the role of captor for a distressingly long time.
Once Michele discovers the truth about the boy in the pit, there’s no implication that he might return to a sense of normalcy, but rather that his understanding of the world was entirely based on the limitations of his youthful perspective. The adult world isn’t just dour and ambiguous, it’s downright deadly. The blissful ignorance of childhood just might get you killed. The danger was always there, right before you eyes, you just failed to see it.
I’m Not Scared has been there too, lost right out in the great wide open. It’s well worth searching for and bringing back up into the light, even if the sunny glare offers little respite from the relentless hunger of the dark.
