elisabetta sorio

Esa cosa con alas (Film 4, 2025) es una representación conmovedora y eficaz del duelo, un tema universal que nos toca a todos, tarde o temprano. En esta película, el dolor de un padre y sus dos hijos por la pérdida de su mujer/madre toma la forma de un cuervo, una criatura oscura y a veces incluso monstruosa. En el curso de varios meses los protagonistas cambian su relación con el pájaro, pasando de estar asustados y luchar contra él, a considerarlo una presencia consoladora, que les une a los tres bajo sus alas negras emplumadas. Lo que más destaca es la interpretación de Benedict Cumberbatch que nos transmite todo el agobio y el cansancio de seguir siendo un buen padre mientras que el peso de la pérdida de su pareja le carga mas y mas. Excepcional también la fotografía, que nos regala imágenes y atmósferas preciosas, tanto tiernas como poéticas. Por poco original que sea la metafora, la película tiene un corazón que pulsa y sangra y nos hace sentir toda la crueldad y la grandeza de la vida.

Noviembre 2025

Tenía bajas expectativas con respecto a Frankenstein, la nueva película de Guillermo del Toro producida por Netflix. Sus ultimos proyectos, de hecho, ni se podían comparar a su obra maestra, El laberinto del fauno (Estudio Picasso, 2006), y parecía como si el director mexicano hubiese perdido su toque distintivo. 

Ademas, adaptar una novela tan compleja y llena de interpretaciones como la de Mary Shelley, que desgraciadamente a menudo ha sido vaciada de sus significados reales y reducida a un simple cuento de terror, constituía un reto. 

Pero me sorprendió agradablemente por la realización de la película. Aunque la fotografía no sea especial (se ve claramente que es una película de Netflix), los elementos visuales de la puesta en escena - vestuario, escenario, maquillaje, efectos especiales - reflejan completamente el gusto de Del Toro y hacen que la obra se pueda reconocer como suya y tenga una identidad propia.

Los temas de la novela han sido desarrollados de manera satisfactoria, aunque no perfecta. Se encuentran la arrogancia humana, la intolerancia hacia lo diferente, la falta de empatía para los marginados y la investigación sobre la verdadera naturaleza de la monstruosidad. Fue añadido un matiz de celos al conflicto entre Frankenstein y su creación que está ausente en la obra de Shelley y que arruina un poco la adaptación cinematografica porque es totalmente innecesaria y poco original. 

La actuacion merece cumplidos, ya que todo el reparto dio vida a los personajes verdaderamente bien. Especialmente Oscar Isaac, que lleva el peso de la historia por más de dos horas, y Jacob Elordi, cuya representación impresionante de la criatura destaca su talento. 

Me alegra ver que una adaptación válida de una novela universal, que siempre será relevante y actual, es posible.

Noviembre 2025

Nuestra parte de noche (Anagrama, 2019) de Mariana Enriquez es una novela oscura, hipnótica, que sigue apareciendo en la mente de quien la lee así como las presencias lúgubres de la Obscuridad hacen con Juan y Gaspar, los protagonistas. 

Una narración que se desarrolla a través de varios puntos de vista entre 1960 y 1997 y que, en un perfecto estilo gótico, habla de una secta en búsqueda de la vida eterna. Pero mientras muchas novelas se limitan a elaborar descripciones morbosas de acontecimientos sanguinarios, la de Enriquez profundiza más en las características del género y termina tratando temas universales como la relación paterno-filial, la muerte, la responsabilidad y la culpa. Sobre todo la autora se enfoca en el poder, por el cual todos luchan, destruyendo su propria vida y las de otros más débiles. 

A través de una prosa altamente expresiva, capaz de pintar imágenes poderosas y terribles, Enriquez muestra la corrupción del alma humana, comparando sutilmente los acontecimientos de la dictadura del país con los de la novela. Tanto en el mundo sobrenatural de la Orden, como en el corazón de los seres humanos comunes domina el Mal aunque, a veces, el horror se detiene y deja aparecer un poco de delicadeza, expresión del amor que une a los personajes. 

Si al final gana la crueldad hambrienta de poder o el deseo de vivir en paz, tanto ansiado por los protagonistas, solo lo podrá descubrir quien se deje hechizar por esta novela.

Noviembre 2025

Aunque parece que Una batalla tras otra (Warner Bros Pictures, 2025) será un fracaso, Paul Thomas Anderson no tiene nada que reprocharse. La película ni siquiera logra cubrir los gastos en taquillas pero los críticos concuerdan en que esta obra cinematográfica tiene la relevancia y la magnitud del gran Hollywood de antaño. 

Es un retrato fiel e inclemente de los Estados Unidos, que siguen siendo el escenario de una guerra interna entre gobierno y población. Los protagonistas pertenecen a un grupo revolucionario en lucha contra las instituciones y el ejército para dañar a la clase dirigente que perpetúa las injusticias en detrimento de las clases inferiores. La película refleja la realidad contemporánea, tan cargada de odio e intolerancia que cualquier incidente se convierte en una batalla feroz. Quizas el filme no alcanza el éxito por su brutal honestidad al presentar a los Estadounidenses la gravedad de la situación en su país. 

La narración, sin embargo, también ofrece esperanza contando la historia de Pat, un padre torpe e inutil ex revolucionario, obligado a embarcarse en un viaje rocambolesco para salvar a su hija. A traves de Pat, el director anima a los espectadores mostrando que continuar combatiendo por lo que llevamos en el corazón de cualquier manera, incluso incompetente, es la única solución. 

Noviembre 2025

Almost a year ago I was writing about nostalgia with appreciation, almost fondness. I found it comforting in its own bittersweet way. Just recently have I started to see it in its entirety, to learn about its brutality.  To notice that nostalgia can also be ferocious, like a beast that sinks its teeth deep in your flesh and leaves you bleeding on the ground. That can drive you insane parading in front of you days, people and seasons that won’t come back ever again. 

Letting go has never been my strong suit. I keep books from my childhood, t-shirts from trips with holes in them, DVDs I can’t even play anywhere, postcards from people I haven't talked to in years. Maybe it all stems from my utter incapacity to have faith in the future. To believe that other good things will come. There’s always been a little Schopenhauer in me, despite being a very lucky person. So I stubbornly cling to the past. Change is the intrinsic value of life but I still haven’t made complete peace with that. I can accept that Ferrari is not the winning team it was when I was a child, cheering the pilots in front of the tv with my dad. I can accept that the jean jacked I loved so much, the one with a strawberry on the back, doesn’t fit me anymore. I can accept that there won’t be any new books by Paul Auster. I can accept the lack of magic in my life because I don't believe in fairy tales anymore and I can accept the disillusionment of adulthood. But when the heart calls back to the people I had to leave behind, I rebel to detachment. There’s many forms of art I dislike: Cubism, Dante’s Paradise, 2001: A Space Odyssey. The art of letting go is among them. Maybe my life would improve from learning it but I stopped buying into the myth of continuous betterment a little while back. 

So bring on the melodies and smells that take me back weeks, months, years. Bring back the dead, the forgotten, the abandoned and let them inhabit my soul for a little while longer. Let there be sadness and enragement and indignation for the impossible return of who is long gone. Let me talk nonsense and let me wish out loud for the seasons to rewind; let the deafening silence that follows fall upon me like an intolerable burden. 

October 2025

I was lying in my bed a few nights ago when I found myself thinking about the bathroom in my studio apartment in Melbourne. Suddenly, I started to miss that little bathroom, although there’s really nothing special about it. The guy I was renting from had even left there a few dried palm branches I used to find so ugly and annoying. And yet that was the cue for all these other memories to start resurfacing. The walk to my job cutting across Fitzroy Gardens, the local library where I borrowed books regularly, the cafe I used to go to get matcha on my day off. I was soon filled with nostalgia, a feeling that I like and consider almost comforting. Daydreaming is my bread and butter therefore it makes sense that I’m such a “fan” of nostalgia. I can spend considerable amounts of time thinking about the past and enveloping myself in this sweet melancholy. Nostalgia is the ‘pain of the return home’ and, curiously enough, it was first identified as an illness in 1688 by a medicine student observing the distress of Swiss mercenaries that had been separated from their homes for long. I do miss my family and my friends sometimes but I mostly feel nostalgic about the past. I am sure that if I was to go back to that same flat in Melbourne and recreate the exact routine I had then it wouldn’t be the same. What I am missing is not the city per se or my apartment but the peculiar quality that my life had in that specific moment. And that’s impossible to bring back that, first and foremost because I am not the same person I was in December of two years ago. I miss the carefreeness of my childhood before I became aware of life’s complicatedness. I miss the controlled freedom of university before I ventured outside in the “real world”. I miss the relaxed lack of expectations I felt in Australia before I realised I wanted something more out of my life. That doesn’t mean I wish to go back, on the contrary. I believe that I am able to appreciate those aspects of my life because I grew out of them and I developed a different awareness about things. Experiences enrich life and I guess I like nostalgia because when I think about my past I feel pretty wealthy.  

December 2024

I think I once read an article about the benefits of walking in nature but all I remember now is that the Japanese have come up with a very specific word to describe this practice. They call it shinrin-yoku 森林 浴 and it kind of translates to “forest bathing”. I’ve always thought it sounded wonderful because it paints a perfectly vivid image of immersing yourself in nature and feeling connected to everything that surrounds you. I love nature because it reminds me of my childhood (I used to climb a lot of trees) and because it’s beautiful. It calms my nerves and lifts my spirits. The sunlight glistening on the water, a gentle breeze between the branches, sparrows hopping beneath the bushes… everything is so serene and I guess I am able to absorb a little of that calmness and stop my restless mind for a while. When things are not that great, I tend to spiral and my unbridled negative emotions can give me a sort of tunnel vision without me even realising. But when I walk around nature I am reminded that everything is transitory. The leaves fall and rot away and feed the soil from which flowers will bloom. Or they feed the worms that will be then eaten by the birds. These cycles have been the same for thousands of years, repetitive and yet transformative at the same time. It makes me feel like my problems and bad moods shall pass too, that I just have to live through them until they stop hurting. And sometimes I can even turn off my very human self-centeredness and go as far as thinking that it’s not that big of a deal. I might be feeling heartbroken but the fact that the duck in the pond in front of me keeps pedaling in the water, unconcerned, unbothered, unaware, somehow helps me to reduce my sorrows.  By being surrounded by so many living things that are small and silent and often unnoticeable I can briefly shift my perception of things and realise that the world keeps spinning nonetheless. 

November 2024

It’s only in recent years that I have started to appreciate walking around the city, especially if alone, at night. Being a 158 cm tall woman, this borders on being dangerously reckless but, with the necessary precautions, I strive to maintain this “hobby”. I will look outside the window at 22:14 on a Tuesday night and decide to go out with no destination and no expectations. In fact, I’m just roaming around a few blocks, but in my head the experience is somehow heightened. It feels special to lose myself in the streets observing life as it flows and ebbs around me. To walk and be guided just by my curiosity. Whenever I do that I am reminded of Baudelaire and his flâneur. In The Painter of Modern Life (1863) he described this peculiar dandyish type that had no greater joy than walking around the city without a destination, just for the sake of it. At the time cities were just starting to be urbanised in the modern sense of the term and it must have been exciting to see this revolution happening before your eyes. Paris was the largest city in Europe at the time, it was the place to be. The population was growing at a rate never seen before. It felt like being the center of the world. Hence Baudelaire’s fascination with what we now consider mundane. At the time it felt like taking part in a revolution by simply going out of the house to soak up the urban environment. To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be at the very centre of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world, such are some of the minor pleasures of those independent, intense and impartial spirits, who do not lend themselves easily to linguistic definitions. The observer is a prince enjoying his incognito wherever he goes. Now, I don’t consider myself a prince, but I must admit that walking without being noticed and catching things that usually go unnoticed gives me a sense of power. I am an invisible urban adventurer. A witness of the extraordinary in the mundane. I capture that spark of specialty that lies in banality. Somehow stuff like the soft light of a lamppost or a child's glove forgotten on a bench or an elderly person walking their dog feels like a small spectacle. In a way it’s like rediscovering them, it feels exciting. Then I go back home, I step out of my flâneur persona and go back to being my usual self. Like everybody else, I am usually too entangled in my routine to feel romantic about it. Until next time, when I’ll feel in the mood for a night walk.

September 2024

As a person, I think I’m quite alright. I actually like myself, despite what my self-deprecating humour might suggest. I don’t spend much time ruminating about this but I know it to be true. And yet sometimes, I play a cruel trick on myself. I start paying attention to my shortcomings rather than my achievements, I focus on my flaws rather than my qualities and I end up thinking that I could be… more. I could be more assertive, stronger, more skilled, smarter, prettier, more capable, bolder. I could push myself more and get better at things I’m only decent at. I could improve my camera work, I could strengthen my chicken arms, I could get better at parallel parking, I could correct my posture, I could be more talkative in social situations, I could learn how to put on makeup properly, I could inform myself better on the state of the world… if I start going down that road I won’t stop soon. I’ll keep nagging myself thinking that I for sure am good, but I fall just a little short of being great. I imagine this ideal Elisabetta. She is just like me, just a little bit better. Suddenly I feel like I’m not good enough. Why do I buy into this idea that people should constantly be improving themselves? The world we live in is astoundingly competitive and ruthless and feeds us the idea that happiness is achievable for everyone, but it’s always just slightly outside our reach. They make us feel like we need more, we deserve more, we can be more. Even when you have everything, they make you feel like you’re missing something. Realising you can sell personal development was capitalism’s golden goose. Now they make us chase that as well as objects and commodities. Surrounded by uncertainty, noise and madness we lose sight of the important bits and feel even worse, because we feel like we’re the broken ones, not the system. But even when I reached this conclusion I was not feeling any better. Because I felt that even if it wasn’t my fault, but a psychological pressure that is being constantly fed to me, I was still putting pressure on myself to fix that. Part of this problem is that I am a deeply impatient person, I really cannot take things slowly. I have to make progress, fast, even if it’s about my mental health. So instead of seeing this as yet another thing I have to get better at, I shifted my approach. So what if I am a failing, insignificant, little thing? I am still here, life goes on, there’s room for me as well in this world. This absurd line of reasoning helps me take away the pressure I tend to put on myself. If it’s true that we are made of elements that originated from supernovas, it’s useful to remember that those same elements also make up rocks. I’ll be alright even if I can’t reach the stars. 

September 2024