The Girl in the Fog

Making his directorial debut with this ambitious noir-ish crazy-quilt of a film, Donato Carrisi—author of the titular 2015 bestselling novel—takes chances with structure and sense. When a young teenaged girl from an ultra-religious small-town northern Italian family mysteriously disappears, local police chief Vogel (Toni Servillo) must come up with a kidnapper and quickly. So he makes brazen use of unscrupulous methods such as cajoling the media to harass potential suspects to see if they will crack and confess (a method viewers learn has backfired on Vogel at least once before). But when he sets his sights on a seemingly innocuous high school professor as the culprit, he gets much more than he bargains for. The teacher (Alessio Boni) turns the tables on his unscrupulous cop pursuers, after which the line between pursuer and pursued/victim and victimizer starts to get a bit fuzzy. The film’s eventual descent into directorial self-indulgence leads to a free-for-all non-conclusion that leaves too many loose ends dangling and never fulfills the promise of the movie’s first half. A strong optional purchase. (M. Sandlin)