Salvo

Cutting a scene a little long can render it dull; somehow, elongating it further leads to intrigue. So what of Salvo, a Sicilian hitman tale, which stretches acts out like dough, testing but never quite breaking?

From a standard opening of bullets and bloodshed it morphs in pace and format in unexpected directions. Mafioso Salvo (Saleh Bakri), while pursuing a target, encounters the man’s blind sister and an existential crisis is sparked from a miracle. There are underlying notes of The Killer, with a saviour blind to inner ugliness, but with the added harsh realism of Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah.

Problems lie in the characters themselves, infused with such meaning it detracts from their truth. These sparsely scripted abstracts refuse to allow us in. Visually confident with a notably bare sound design of introspective silences, ticking clocks, a solitary barking dog, it’s a film sure of its movement, strolling like a lion. But it may prove divisive: audiences are often uninterested in pure grace and beauty. Occasionally we want to see tricks. [Alan Bett]