{Movie Review} Saturnalia (2026)

There’s a specific kind of film that announces itself in the first five minutes. You see the color palette, hear the first few bars of the score, watch the camera drift across marble floors in a way that feels both deliberate and slightly unhinged, and you know exactly what you’re in for. Director Daniel Lerch’s Saturnalia is that kind of film. The giallo influence isn’t suggested or hinted at. It’s right there from the jump, drenched in the sort of vibrant, saturated hues that Dario Argento built a career on. For a certain stripe of horror fan, that’s enough to get you in the door. Whether it’s enough to keep you there is a more complicated question.

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Set in 1979, the film follows Miriam Basconi (played with a wide eyed freshness by Sophia Anthony), a young woman packed off to the prestigious Alstroemerias Academy following the mysterious deaths of both her parents. It’s a premise that understands the assignment immediately. The academy has the full giallo starter pack: marble halls, lurking shadows, the iron grip of a cruel Headmistress Hemlock whose name alone is doing a lot of heavy lifting, masked villains, black gloves, and lots of pretty engenues ripe for the picking. Students vanish in the night. Strange men hover at the edges of the frame. Miriam, because she’s the kind of protagonist who can’t just keep her head down, starts pulling at threads and finds something far stranger than a simple institutional cover-up. There’s a hidden world pulsing within the school itself, a surreal realm where nightmare and reality blur, and surviving it means confronting not just the authority above her but the living, breathing mystery at the academy’s core.

It’s a great setup. Genuinely. And visually, Saturnalia delivers on most of its promises. The color work is confident, the giallo DNA unmistakable and clearly loved rather than merely referenced. This is a film made by people who know the genre and care about it, which already puts it ahead of a lot of the “inspired by” crowd.

But here’s where the conversation gets honest.

Saturnalia is a film shot on a modest budget, and the ambition occasionally outpaces the execution in ways that are hard to ignore. The long pans in and out are a genuine problem. What should feel like slow-burn dread ends up feeling like stalled momentum, and there are stretches where the pacing noticeably suffers for it. A few cutaways run well past the point of utility, holding on images that have already done their work. The film trusts its atmosphere, which is admirable, but trusting it at the expense of the pacing feels like maybe a step too far.

There’s also a question of identity. Saturnalia is clearly positioned as a giallo, and it wears that label well in certain respects, but it’s operating in at least three or four different registers simultaneously. There’s an erotic thriller quality to parts of it. There are stretches that feel like traditional giallo procedural. There are slasher elements. There are weird, surrealist horror sequences that push toward something more cosmic. The result is a film that sometimes feels like it hasn’t fully committed to what it wants to be. Giallos already feel elevated I am not sure trying to add to the already complex genre does the movie any favors. it still feels very much like a film that’s still working out its own genre identity.

None of this is fatal. First features shot on limited budgets with genre-forward ambitions are allowed to be messy, and Saturnalia is more interesting in its messiness than a lot of cleaner, blander entries in the giallo revival space. Sophia Anthony holds the center with enough grounded specificity that you stay invested even when the film loses the thread. And whenever the score kicks in, the whole enterprise snaps back into focus.

Saturnalia is the kind of indie that rewards patience and a certain generosity of spirit. If your tolerance for atmosphere-forward pacing is high, you should give it give it a watch. It is gorgeous to look at and that counts for something.

Saturnalia is now available to rent or buy on Amazon Video.