Review of I'm Not Scared (2003) by Nick M — 06 May 2004

This film is set in 1978 in a rural village in Italy in the middle of seemingly never-ending wheat fields. One day, a 10-year-old boy named Michele is out playing by an old abandoned farmhouse and finds a piece of corrugated metal covering a hole in the ground. He lifts the metal and peers into the hole, which is about 10 feet deep. Poking out from under a heaped up blanket, he spots a human foot.

Michele seems pretty shocked by this discovery. He jumps on his bicycle and rides as fast as he can back to the village. On the way, he meets his younger sister, but for some reason, he doesn't share his discovery with her. Odd. The two of them return home where their parents are waiting. But instead of launching into a hysterical tale about the foot in the hole like any normal kid would do, Michele remains silent. Why? Because he's some sort of a freak, that's why. Instead, he decides to keep his discovery a secret.

The following day, he gets back on his little bicycle and rides out thru the wheat fields to the hole again. This time he throws pebbles at the foot until suddenly a creature jumps out from under the blanket and scares the bejesus out of both me and Michele. So Michele puts the lid on the hole and races home on his bike but still doesn't tell anyone. Instead, being the freak he is, he returns again the next day.

This time he stays long enough to discover that the scary creature is another 10-year-old boy named Filippo, who's all matted and disheveled and caked with blood and shackled by his foot in the bottom of the hole. But Filippo doesn't ask for help and Michele doesn't offer any. No questions are asked, as if it's just the most natural thing in the world to discover a boy shackled in the bottom of a hole. Michele gets Filippo some water and promises to bring him some food the next day.

And so they become secret friends. Michele starts hanging out in the bottom of the hole on a regular basis, bringing Filippo bread and chatting about school and such. One day, Michele finds that Filippo has been cleaned up and his ankle cuff has been removed, so he takes him on a little excursion from his underground hovel up to the wheat fields where the two boys roll around and laugh and talk. But after an afternoon of fun, Michele says he has to go home to set the table, so he'd better put Filippo back in his hole and Filippo agrees. Talk about a compliant victim.

Meanwhile, as their friendship is blossoming, Michele goes home one night and sees a photo of Filippo on TV and learns that he's been kidnapped and the bad guys are threatening to cut one of his ears off if the parents don't pay the ransom soon. Apparently, kidnappings were pretty popular in Italy in the late 70's. You'd think this new information might cause Michele to take some sort of action, but you'd be wrong. Freak.

So there's a little more to the plot than this, but I don't want to give it away in case anyone reads this and actually decides to see the movie anyway. It's not a horrible film, and the child actors are really good, but I wonder, would all of these critics be giving it such great reviews if it didn't have subtitles?