THE STORY – Sam, a young film student, discovers a hard drive detailing the life and career of forgotten Giallo Italian horror director Saturnino Barresi. As she begins to investigate his mysterious disappearance, Sam finds herself pulled into a violent conspiracy eerily similar to those of the films she adores.
THE CAST – Diletta Guglielmi, Angelica Kim, Nancy Kimball, Hugo Alexander-Rose, Rutanya Alda, Onur Tukel, Ian Fidance, Carolyn Farina, Larry Fessenden, Douglas Buck, Stan Oh, Michael M. Bilandic & Maggie
THE TEAM – Josh Heaps (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 74 Minutes
It’s hard to get movie nerds to agree about anything, but one point that most would see eye to eye on is that, on average, modern films are less visually appealing than those released in the 20th century. A major reason for this is the general desaturation of Hollywood films, often for the less-than-noble reason of making it easier to insert visual effects in post-production. As in contemporary architecture and car manufacturing, the preferred color palette of present-day filmmaking is a bland, washed-out gray. Giallo films of the ’70s are on the complete opposite end of the aesthetic scale. Known for their excessively colorful stylings, these delightfully nasty Italian films are so visually loud that any single frame from one would likely give a 2026 studio head an aneurysm. Cinephiles crave a return to films that prioritize not just the story they’re telling, but specifically how the story is presented in a visual medium. Writer-director Josh Heaps has heard that wish and makes it come true with “City Wide Fever,” his beyond-loving ode to giallo. It includes all the features and bugs of the subgenre, such as intoxicating imagery, a disorienting story, and a frightened main character who falls deeper and deeper into a dangerous mystery.
Said frightened main character is Sam (Diletta Guglielmi), a film fan who finds a USB drive while walking around New York City. On it, she discovers files related to the works of Italian director Saturinio Barresi, who is “considered by some to be the true father of Italian horror.” Sam learns that after directing three films that have since been largely forgotten, Barresi vanished while scouting locations in Times Square for what would’ve been his fourth film, “City Wide Fever.” Immediately captivated, Sam decides to try to get to the bottom of the director’s disappearance, with the hopes of turning her hunt into a documentary. Her search takes her to the depths of Manhattan and beyond, and it’s not long before bodies start mysteriously piling up around her, making it clear that her innocent project might be more than just creatively risky.
The movie makes its disinterest with a typical narrative structure or modern filmmaking standards immediately clear. It opens with a dizzying, destabilizing montage of New York City, intercut with nonsensical images and atypical angles of standard metropolitan elements. Heaps quickly establishes that, although the setting may be familiar, his manner of exploring it will not be.
From there, the film gets only more wonderfully bizarre. Ethan Johnson’s cinematography further separates the world of “City Wide Fever” from the real world the audience inhabits. Shot on low-quality digital cameras, the film’s home-video look makes it feel even more uncanny, as if we’re watching somebody’s private footage. On top of that, the film is absolutely drowning in color, often during scenes of peril or unease. And the chosen colors aren’t always the most obvious at the moment. For example, one early kill scene is bathed in total blue. And even the less ostentatiously-lit sequences don’t shy away from eye-catching color. In one sequence, Sam leaves the city and travels to Sleepy Hollow, where the greens look so, well, green. And the editing, with delightfully deployed double exposures, slow-motion, and crossfades, emphasizes the dreamy nature of the story.
It’s truly impressive how much better this low-budget film looks than most of the slop Hollywood pumps out nowadays. The only disappointing technical element is the music, which appears to have been sourced from multiple musicians’ preexisting tracks. They’re generally well-composed, but the film could’ve benefitted from a unified musical sound, further contributing to the eerie energy (although the music of Dressel Amorosi, one of the film’s more frequently used artists, has made for wonderful background music while writing this review).
Diletta Guglielmi is a totally compelling lead as Sam. The actress is fully committed to the film’s brazenly strange tone, delivering her lines with heightened emotion that appropriately borders on camp. And her full devotion to the movie’s energy has a meta element, as it starts to feel like the character truly believes she is in a giallo film. This is undercut by moments of surprising humor, such as when her friend Chloe (Angelica Kim) listens to Sam’s latest story about a supposedly dangerous encounter and hilariously responds, “You were in Gowanus, down the street from Whole Foods.”
“City Wide Fever” is primarily for fans of giallo, or, more broadly, for those who love creatively constructed genre films in general. It’s a strange story that only gets more and more unrealistic as the film goes on, and time and space themselves start to bend. It certainly won’t work for most filmgoers. But for those looking for a movie that doesn’t care about modern trends and is unapologetic about being visually wondrous and delightfully bizarre, this fever may be just what the doctor ordered.
