FrightFest review – The Nameless Ballad
The latest from FrightFest regular Federico Zampaglione, of Shadow and The Well (and the well-remembered Tulpa), is an obviously personal drama about singer-songwriter Sam Gallo (Jamie Ward), who has hit that dicey-for-rock’n’roll age of 27 and is struggling to get past his previous addiction issues while working on that difficult second album. British-raised but Italian-born, Sam returns to his roots by renting an out-of-the-way Italian villa where he can hole up with his dog Elvis and prove to the internet posters that he’s not a one-hit wonder. He has phone chats with his agent Paul (Seumas Sargent) and supportive girfriend Tania (Alana Boden) but mostly he’s on his own with his muse … and the lingering spirit of a musically-inclined woman (Giglia Marra) who had a very bad time in the villa in the 1930s.
When Sam finds the dead woman’s journal – one of those leatherbound diaries which signify oldness in the movies but which I can’t remember being a thing much before 2010 – and the key to her pianoforte, he begins composing, but is it entirely his music. The first two-thirds of The Nameless Ballad are a little on the uneventful side, with Ward being convincing but unappealing as the whiny protagonist – we have to take his genius on trust, since the snatches of his lyrics we hear are fairly banal – and not much going on in the spook side of the street. However, the extended finale catches fire, tapping into the Italian gothic style of the 1960s (especially Margheriti’s La Danza Macabra) with some startling apparitions and Sam being lured into performing a duet with the ghost which leaves blood on the keyboard.
The Nameless Ballad is resolutely but interestingly old-fashioned, even in its few moments of shock. Zampaglione also co-wrote with Barbara Baraldi.
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