The Nest (2019) User Reviews

I get the point but

[borgolarici · 6/10 · 7 September 2019]

I love that bourgeois decadent aesthetic as much as everyone else but this movie is too damn slow.

Literally nothing happens for 2/3 of the movie and the final twist doesn't really make up for it. The idea should have been explored a lot more

From Italy? For real?

[sentnza · 7/10 · 14 January 2020]

Yes, the authors and director are clearly influenced by M. Night Shyamalan: the girl running outside the door is a cut and past from The Visit.

But I think that this is OK. If you want emulate, emulate the best!

This is an Italian film. I'm so happy to see a work like this. It is so well packaged. Just some horrorific action more and it could be outstanding.

Zombies appears just for some seconds but I appreciate how they move and that faces are very impressive. Not so well the cliché "shot in their head".

Hope to see a new work from this director. With more action, a little bit more original and more horror. Please, try yo scare me!

Good form. Poor content

[larkinriver · 6/10 · 16 August 2019]

To watch the movie is not a bad experience, the acting is very good and the atmosphere is intriguing. What bugged me the most is the lack of originality, the story works but it feels like it is copy pasted from different stories. Personally i would not have included the zombies, there are 1.000 and more ways for the world to end, why did it have to be unexplained (á la walking dead) zombies with the clichéd "shot them in the head" thing? I didn't like it that much

Slow but elegant and surprisingly good

[fbaston · 7/10 · 6 July 2020]

Very very slow movie and somehow boring in its first part, it is surprisingly good once the end is revealed. De Feo direction is really classy and the cast is good.

The house is awesome, the sub-themes are many

[nsugamori · 7/10 · 29 October 2023]

The cinematography is good. The characters are emotional. It's very difficult to expect anyone to understand what they have without knowing what its like to have none of it. There are several threads of thought within the film. There is the evil that inhabits those with too much control. There is the desperation that comes with keeping dark secrets. Love is easily distorted when one tells themselves that everything they so is for others. People only ever do what they believe, so what they want. There is a man in this film that enjoys being horrible. He feels he can justify himself by saying it is someone else making the decisions. No one can be like he is without being truly depraved deep inside himself. A sub-theme is the significance of music genres. Music is best enjoyed when all the genres are understood- not just one. Possibly the film can be summarized by saying happiness is best enjoyed while knowing what you do not want.

Extra point for featuring a piano version of Pixies' "Where is my Mind?"

[Coventry · 3/10 · 27 October 2021]

It's not possible to write anything about "The Nest" without revealing essential spoilers, whether it's regarding the actual content or at least the concept Roberto De Feo had in mind. Here goes: the film badly suffers from the horrible (and sadly incurable) M. Night Shyamalan syndrome. It means that everything is built up towards one massively unpredictable, but also misfitting and implausible, plot twist at the end. But a film, even a horror film, is so much more than simply a surprise ending. It also means the screenplay tries to be SO mysterious, SO secretive and SO convoluted that a) it's just plain boring most of the running time, and b) when the climax eventually approaches and the time has arrived to finally come up with some adequate explanations, the script can't possibly provide any explanations that are strong enough to live up to the expectations that were built up.

(Too) many movies unfortunately suffer from the Shyamalan syndrome, but "The Nest" suffers from it so terribly that it might as well could have been directed by M. Night Shyamalan himself; - or at least an Italian cousin of his. The film, or at least the climax, is very similar to "The Village", and yours truly just happens to find this one of the worst movies ever made.

"The Nest" opens quite promisingly, in a sort of gothic large estate setting, and with an intriguing sequence revolving around a father and a mother debating about something serious, and the father subsequently running off like a thief in the night with their child. Heck, for a brief moment, I even cherished high hopes that Italian horror was about to make a great comeback. Alas, though. The rest of "The Nest" revolves around the paranoid mother obsessively protecting her son in a wheelchair (as a result of the escape attempts at the beginning gone wrong) from everything that happens outside the fence lines of the estate. The whole family lives at the estate, but it's strictly forbidden to talk about the outside world. Then another uncle arrives and brings along a 15-year-old girl, and she naturally sparks the hormones of young Samuel, as well as his over curiosity in life.

The attentive and experienced viewer will probably suspect, early on already, that something dreadful happened to the world outside, like a nuclear apocalypse or another World War, but the script and the director stubbornly insist on making us believe it's just a dysfunctional family with dark secrets or satanic routines. Keep your thinking straight, and pay attention to little details, and you will not be fooled. Personally, I find there's very little to recommend about "The Nest", except perhaps the performances of the young couple (Justin Korovkin and Ginevra Francesconi), and the beautiful piano version of "Where is my Mind" by Pixies.

Worst movie of all time

[ysnnvscsp · 1/10 · 26 January 2024]

Complete waste of time, this movie is so bad I felt compelled to open an account and write a review in hopes of helping people avoid this garbage. Please save yourselves and don't watch this movie. It's unbelievable bad. It's the most boring and pointless thing I've ever put myself through for one hour and forty seven minutes. I would've literally rather watched Frozen with my daughter for the millionth time over this. Breaking my nose was a more enjoyable experience than watching this movie. One time I was stuck in traffic for over 7 hours because of a hazmat spill and that was more entertaining than this movie.

An excellent gothic

[SuperEnrico95 · 8/10 · 15 August 2019]

It is a pleasure to see films of this genre in the Italian panorama. The Nest is directed by Roberto De Feo, here at his first rehearsal as a director. In some places we see that this is his debut film but otherwise he has an excellent staging where the jumpscares are not the tension but the gothic atmospheres and the fact that there is a mystery behind the whole. Excellent the cast, chosen with great care and above all excellent the ending that initially may leave you perplexed but, observing the film, the dialogues and certain enigmatic scenes, we can understand that that ending was well studied. Recommended!

Nothing happens

[laura_mame · 2/10 · 7 February 2021]

After the 1st half I already wanted to leave but I decided to give it a chance, and honestly I wish I didn't... Nothing happens, it's painstakingly slow and since allegedly it's a horror movie I was expecting some suspense, a little thill... but no. Nothing happens until the last 10 min or so, and even then it's ridiculous, it doesn't justify the torture of going through almost 2h of nothing and to top it up the special effects are pathetic... if you still want to see this poor excuse for a movie be my guest, but I'd advise to save your time and money until they start releasing real movies again.

Truly awful

[fromthewater · 1/10 · 15 August 2019]

Absolutely the worst 2 hours of my life. Pathetic.

Honestly People...Come on

[Allaboutfall · 1/10 · 13 November 2023]

I do not understand the high ratings regarding this movie; I'm truly at a loss.

People want to call this movie an aesthetically, beautiful, dark and intelligent, slow burn, when in reality it's simply long, boring, and wasteful.

There is so much of nothing going on for an hour and a half, no explanation as to the motives of the psychotic mother, the brain numbing pace, the child who is so micromanaged you began to wonder if he's truly brainwashed, or just stupidly compliant.

The scenes are so long and drawn out without any cohesive understanding as to what prior scenes have to do with what is currently happening.

Just gloom, doom, an overly dominant mother, the other psychotic character, the doctor, and household staff who wander around, terrified, of who knows what.

And, that ending. Really? Surely the producers could have given better subtle cues within the movie, so when the end comes you're prepared for it all to make sense. No. You're just left scratching your head going, huh? With all that said, after the big reveal at the end, (you still hate the mother) you'd think the mother would've wanted that kid to walk... but, you have to watch it to understand what I'm saying; or just watch 30 minutes then fast forward to the end, and ask yourself it it was worth fast forwarding, or sitting through all the drivel.

De Feo's "The Nest" may represent the rebirth of a long forgotten genre like the italian horror

[andrealeonti · 8/10 · 20 August 2019]

Let's be clear: horror is a genre that in Italy has been forgotten for about 20-25 years. After ancient glories and masterpieces signed by worldwide-acclaimed masters such as Argento, Fulci, Avati and Bava, horror cinema seems to have totally disappeared from national screens.

Roberto De Feo's "The Nest" is the breath of rebirth and resurrection of a long forgotten genre. The Nest is a horror that does not point to fear or disgust with particular visual artifices, but adheres to a more suspended, obscure and implicit line like Robert Eggers' "The Witch". Except for two or three visually more decisive and explicit sequences (placed however in a timely manner and not inopportune) it is a film that is based on dark atmospheres, on a sense of anguish and on a feeling that something strange is about to occur. It is a horror that also presents very delicate sequences, not trivial and well cohesive with the rest of the work. A fairly predictable end, however, if one takes into account the clues given here and there in the film and the narrative evolution of the story. An ending that presents nothing innovative, but well cohesive with the premise built by the film.

On a technical level, it presents a really beautiful and extremely accurate photography, moreover being a horror, and an Italian horror. From the directorial style it would be very plausible to believe that it is an Anglo-Saxon or American production. De Feo's direction is obscure, punctual, precise, elegant, enveloping but also sufficiently detached. Actorial evidence is positive on the whole, except for some high and low of some actors.

The Nest could be the rebirth of a new wave of Italian horror, and I sincerely hope that it is not a beacon of darkness destined, inexorably, to go out to make a long-forgotten genre return to oblivion.

7.5/10

Haunting, powerful and elegant

[morinstef · 10/10 · 20 August 2019]

"The Nest", a sophisticated combination of horror/psycho drama by Italian director Roberto De Feo (awards for short films "Child K" and "Ice Scream") was presented at the 72nd Locarno film festival. This film is by no means a simple jump-scare distraction; it is incisive and distressing and begs contemplation. De Feo and director of photography Emanuel Pasquet work with dark, merciless elegance to exhault a powerful cast (Francesca Cavallin, Ginevra Francesconi, Justin Korovkin, Maurizio Lombardi) and the desolate beauty of the location. Tension and anxiety are deftly accumulated to depict the tragedy of vulnerability deformed into paranoia that proliferates through annihilating forms of power. The struggle ensues when vital forces attempt to protect innocence and the need to love and give courage to live in the unimagined truth.