Twenty-something Lia suggests to 18-year-old Giulio that they turn their backs to the cliff and run through the dark with the headlights off. Their romance began when they met at the border of youth, full of excitement, immature impulses, and secrets too difficult to confess. Reminiscent of the genealogy of fascinating Italian cinema, The Den looks like a countryside love story that wavers back and forth between decadence and beauty, yet it is actually a film that comes from of point of cold, hollow pain. Lia, the woman next door who captivates the innocent Giulio, is portrayed as a femme fatale that awakens impulses of sex and death, pleasure and destruction. But when Giulio peers into her house, his illusions are shattered. The Den becomes more interesting in the middle, where it articulates a woman’s circumstances as the master of her own life and not as an ambiguous object of desire. The film captures the depressed and suppressed psychology of a daughter taking care of her ailing mother and does so in a delicate extreme close-up against the background of a secretive house. The writer’s talent for igniting a relationship between characters centered on sexuality, while reversing the instigator from the traditional man to a woman, and further organizing an uneasy solidarity, is quite impressive. The film charts a trajectory of isolation and alienation from women’s unspoken pain and raises questions about the uneven conditions for survival that sick women face. [KIM Somi]