Italian film-maker Michelangelo Frammartino, creator of the subtle and beautiful movie Le Quattro Volte (The Four Times), has returned with his first substantial feature in 12 years. It is effectively another silent movie: a mysterious, wordless evocation of Calabria in southern Italy, notionally set in the early 60s but actually unfolding in something like geological time. The dead-slow, dead-calm Il Buco (The Hole) is similar to Le Quattro Volte in style and substance, and incidentally restates a trope from that film: the ageing, unwell shepherd, played by a nonprofessional, whose craggy face is itself a kind of microcosmic landscape on which the camera lingers in closeup.
