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Cult Review
Senior Film Conservator
Honestly, you have to be in a specific mood for Il trattato scomparso. It’s not exactly a thrill ride. If you like the feeling of old libraries and men in suits shouting about papers, you’ll dig it. If you want something fast, just go watch Hell Divers instead.
There’s a weird, stiff energy to the whole thing. It’s like everyone is acting at 1.5x speed while the cameras are stuck in mud. I couldn't stop looking at the way Ernesto Sabbatini moves through the frame. He enters rooms like he’s worried the floorboards might give out.
The plot is exactly what you’d expect from the title. A paper goes missing, and everyone acts like the world is ending. It’s so earnest, which makes the whole thing feel slightly funny. At one point, the dialogue gets so repetitive that I thought my player was looping. It wasn't.
The lighting is… well, it’s there. Sometimes a character is fully lit, and other times their face is just a smudge of shadows. It feels like they were filming in whatever basement they could find for the day. It’s not quite as polished as Rob Roy, but that’s fine. It has a scrappy, thrown-together feel that keeps you awake.
Maybe it’s just me, but the way they handle the mystery feels like a game of telephone gone wrong. You lose the point about twenty minutes in and stop caring about the treaty entirely. You just end up watching for the weird facial expressions. 🤨
It’s not a masterpiece. It’s not even a great forgotten gem. But it’s human in its messiness. It reminds me of watching The Shadow of a Doubt, if that film had been filmed on a shoestring budget in a single afternoon. Sometimes a movie just needs to exist, and that's enough.