THE RABBIT’S EYE

Since the oral tradition in the 16th century, the deathless character of Doctor Faustus embodies the visceral impulse to overcome limits, exchanging the soul in return of power, knowledge, or love. In THE RABBIT’S EYE, this journey of conquest and corruption, is faced by a woman. LIZ, a young violist, gets accompanied by her mother FLORA in the descent to the underworld, to save her family from bankruptcy, and satisfy her own artistic ambitions, giving her soul in return. I see Liz as a modern, female Faust, who finds herself growing up into a world where moral values are upside down, discovering the compromise and the bitterness of a society made by human demons. The entire drama is developed through various female point of views: mothers, sisters, friends. All of them are moved by deep and different desires, but also, as women, connected between each other by the urgency of a social redemption. The status of the characters, however, is embedded in a much more complex and extended reality than their female condition: the social machine of capitalism is a dysfunctional system indeed, which involves the whole of society not just women, and so much as Faust, Liz will find herselves trapped in a roundabout of damnation. The visual tone is evocative of the mystery, superstition, and that touch of black magic which also are in the Faust’s novels by Christopher Marlowe, J. W. Goethe, Thomas Mann. Hypnotic flowers, dangerous shadows, golden ringlets becaming black, and a one-eye rabbit, are some of the uncanny elements grafted into a modern today life, making it unstable, and unpredictable. The epicenter of the fear is the HOLE. Strange, inexplicable, and yet there, concrete, every night bigger and deeper. The hole is a demon, a new shape of Mefistofele, which infect the house, the family, the souls. The primordial shape of the hole is prone to stirring fears in the unconscious of anyone who looks at it, and to create it, I will manly use organic elements, as wood and soil, for a material density, a realistic effect. In post-production, the graphics and the color grading will extend the depth, as the hole at the end will have not a bottom. As the hole gowns, the reality degenerates around it, taking ghostly nuances: the house will slowly break down, ageing, and the characters will gradually lose their initial colors. The Supernatural Horror is the main genre of the film, but there will be moments of cross-over with the Ghost Story, Possession, Haunted House, and Psychological subgenres.