Penelope Cruz as a fishwife? Unlikely but true in this melodramatic study of life, death, hope and despair in Italy. When the daughter of successful Dr Timoteo (writer/director Sergio Castellitto) is hit by a car, his fretful time in the waiting room ignites the memory of a doomed love affair with ‘Italia’ (Cruz). They meet in flash-back when his car fails near her rundown house in the middle of a halted construction site (symbolic, you see). Despite her assistance, he rapes the woman then begins to stalk her. Forced sex and beatings subside into an exploited tolerance from which emerges a most unlikely love affair. So all-consumed is he that the married man even proposes to Italia as he considers leaving his family and extremely comfortable life. Marked by a terrifically shrewish performance by Cruz (a career best), Don’t Move captures the heart of emotional torment, Italian style. In Castellitto’s second film as director he displays a tremendous gift for gut-wrenching cinema as each of his central characters shift around the concept of victim to take control of their lives. Without resorting to overt cliché, he deploys familiar Italian concepts (Timo’s gorgeous wife as a Madonna-whore by example) as parallel storylines engage and the ‘good’ doctor resets his moral compass. While Don’t Move may not enjoy the broad appeal of similar productions (the films of Almodovar for instance), it eschews weighty sentiment to achieve more than you might anticipate with tremendous skill, authenticity and ingenuity. Which is the point after-all, surely.

// COLIN FRASER