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The Double Hour

1 disc
Region Free (info)

Love and danger unexpectedly meet in this offbeat thriller with comic elements from Italian filmmaker Giuseppe Capotondi. Sonia (Ksenia Rappoport) is a young woman from Eastern Europe who has recently come to live in Turin and wants to find a boyfriend. With this in mind, she signs up for a speed-dating service, and among the men she meets is Guido (Filippo Timi), an ex-cop-turned-security guard who has been making the rounds of the singles scene for a while. Sonia likes Guido and he feels the same way about her, passing along his belief that when the hour and minute sides of the clock feature the same numbers, it's a sign of good luck and one can use the occasion to make a wish. However, Guido's luck takes a turn for the worse while Sonia visits the villa where he keeps watch -- a handful of burglars break in and Guido is shot during the altercation, leaving Sonia to make sense of what happened to make her way to safety. LA DOPPIA ORA (aka THE DOUBLE HOUR) was an official selection at the 2009 Venice International Film Festival.
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Credits

Xenia Rappoport, Ksenia Rappoport, Filippo Timi, Antonia Truppo, Giorgio Colangeli, Gaetano Bruno, Michele DiMauro
Critic Reviews

3 stars out of 5 -- "[A] captivating romantic mystery....Rappoport and Timi carry the film's oblique tone, saying as much through their silences as their dialogue."
Box Office
"Showing special attention to sound design and, as the title suggests, the play of time -- key revelations happen at calculated points in the telling of the story -- it's an expertly crafted work."
Film Comment
"Attention armchair sleuths: After viewing the Italian psychological thriller THE DOUBLE HOUR, you may want to see it a second or even a third time to decipher its secrets."
New York Times
"[A] suave, elliptically drawn neo-noir."
Movieline
"It's a wild tale that's so full of surprises, reversals and double-jointed plot twists that you wouldn't think there'd be room for anything else. But there is."
Los Angeles Times
"Nothing in this enjoyably twisty, cool/hot, genre-grafting Italian psychological thriller by Giuseppe Capotondi is what it seems..." -- Grade: A-
Entertainment Weekly