Summary
A baroque mind-fracture staged in the gaslit salons of Turin’s declining aristocracy: the last heir of the Varrera banking dynasty, Gherardo, wakes each dawn convinced the ancestral blood in his temples is ticking toward delirium. His coterie—dilettantes, decadents, and half-bored cousins—stage an elaborate danse macabre of false telegrams, forged asylums, and spectral nocturnes to prove the young man’s terror a mere phantom. Yet each counterfeit séance peels back deeper strata of rot: a mother who vanished into convent walls, a father whose suicide note was a palimpsest of erasure, portraits whose eyes migrate across the canvas when candlelight gutters. The friends’ pranks metastasize into a Möbius strip of reality; mirrors invert; corridors elongate; a child’s tin drum rolls through marble halls like a distant siege. By the time Gherardo, in bridal-white pajamas, stands on the balustrade at dawn clutching a cracked family goblet, the viewer no longer knows whether the storm is inside the skull or if the palazzo itself has become a cranium, rib-vaulted and echoing with inherited thunder.
Synopsis
A timorous scion of a wealthy family is gaslit by his friends in order to prove that his fears of hereditary insanity are hogwash.
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