YNOT at the Movies

Some directors fall in love with a landscape and forget to introduce us to the people standing in it. That's the trouble at the center of "Arsa" (Italy 2024 | in Italian | 93 min.), the first traditionally plotted narrative feature from Nicolò Massazza and Iacopo Bedogni, who work together under the name MASBEDO. A decade after their vignette-driven "The Lack" (2014), the pair are now working with a single throughline and a script, but the film is so besotted with its volcanic island setting and its lead actress that the story feels like an afterthought bolted onto the postcards.

Arsa (Gala Martinucci) is a strong young woman who has constructed a solitary world for herself in a rundown hovel on the edge of the island, working as its unofficial groundskeeper, wading into the reeds to collect plastic and debris that wash up along the shore. She has learned to see the world through the lens of imagination rather than fact, a habit inherited from her late father (Lino Musella), a sculptor who spent his life bending toward the "pretend beautiful" statues that a cynical patron (Tommaso Ragno) demanded of him, and who left Arsa with fairy tales instead of financial security.

That inheritance is what makes the film's dreamiest passages work. Arsa dives underwater again and again, chasing a bronze statue half-buried in the sand, and Gherardo Gossi's camera lingers on her pale skin against the black volcanic rock and darker water with a tenderness that borders on reverence. It's genuinely moving to watch her reach for a hand that isn't hers to hold, faint, and drift in the depths.

The trouble starts on dry ground. When Andrea (Jacopo Olmo Antinori) arrives with two friends, Pietro (Giovanni Cannata) and Tommaso (Luca Chikovani), to rent a holiday home, Arsa feels her solitary world has been violated. Andrea is spellbound by her all the same, drawn toward a person he slowly realizes he can't actually reach. The problem is that neither character is given much beyond that premise. Andrea is sad about his own father, Arsa is enigmatic, and the film assumes that stating those facts is the same as dramatizing them. Their pull toward each other plays out mostly in glances and silence, which is a defensible choice for a film this interested in mood, but it leaves long stretches where nothing much accumulates. Scenes drift into one another the way memories do, which suits the film's ambition, but the editing by Jacopo Quadri doesn't always give the audience a foothold for where in Arsa's timeline, or her mind, we've arrived.

It doesn't help that the film's visual grammar leans so heavily on close-ups of Martinucci's face and body that other characters start to feel like set dressing. Yet the strange result is that all that proximity doesn't add up to intimacy. Arsa stays a surface the camera studies rather than a person the audience comes to know, and by the film's final stretch, she's exactly as much of a mystery as she was in the opening shot. Musella, an actor capable of real specificity, is mostly asked to embody a storyteller in flashback, present to hand Arsa the fairy tales and the "pretend beautiful" statues she carries into adulthood, rather than play a person in his own right. Ragno's patron barely registers as more than a plot device for Arsa's backstory. The film clearly believes that its images can carry the emotional weight its script doesn't supply, and sometimes they do. But a shot of skin against black sand, however striking, isn't a substitute for a compelling story.

MASBEDO come from visual art and moving-image installation, and it shows, in the film's strengths and in its blind spots alike. This film has a strong eye and very little patience for narrative mechanics, which makes it a frustrating fit for a feature-length running time. There's a genuinely strange, haunting film buried somewhere in its underwater dream sequences—what surrounds them is a story that never quite closes the distance it opens up with its audience, including, in the end, the distance to its own protagonist.

"Arsa" opens in theaters on Friday, September 18, 2026.