Ferine

OVERVIEW

An Italian horror film in English, Ferine follows Irene (Carolyn Bracken), a wealthy art collector who has spent years trying to have a baby. After many failed pregnancies and countless treatments, she is finally able to adopt through a private facility. But on the drive home, a jaguar that has escaped nearby attacks her car and snatches the infant. Unable to cope with the unimaginable trauma, Irene gradually begins to take on the characteristics of the predator that destroyed her life, developing a strange and insatiable appetite for human flesh.

BACKGROUND

Ferine began as Andrea Corsini’s 2019 short of the same name, which he spent six years expanding into a feature. To secure funding, he partnered with EDI Effetti Digitali Italiani, one of Italy’s leading visual effects houses, which had co-produced the short and returned as both producer and VFX partner on the feature. The collaboration allowed Corsini to realize one of the film’s biggest technical challenges: creating a fully digital jaguar that seamlessly interacts with the actors throughout the story. In 2022, the project went through Frontières, Fantasia’s own co-production market, before returning to the festival in 2026 after already competing at Noir in Festival in Italy in December 2025. It won Cheval Noir awards for cinematography and score, and is still seeking international distribution, with Adler Entertainment currently attached only for Italy.

THE REVIEW

The premise of a protagonist increasingly turning into their animalistic selves has given us great horror films. The Fly, An American Werewolf in London, Ginger Snaps, and Schrader’s Cat People all use the transformation to say something specific about the person it is happening to, and they spend time establishing the character we come to care about before the body starts to go. Ferine has the premise, the imagery, and a director with clear ambitions, but it never finds a way to bind those pieces into a satisfying whole.

The opening ten minutes are the best in the film, and they are the farthest away from the central premise. In a handful of elegant and economical scenes, we learn about Irene’s difficulty conceiving and about how determined and emotionally distant she has become. The arrangement at the private facility, a short conversation with the biological mother, and the escape that follows all effectively prepare us for what is coming, and up to the jaguar attack the film has a firm grip on its audience. From the moment the attack happens, however, Corsini makes a few detrimental mistakes. If up to that point it made sense to let the audience piece things together, what the film needed was to slow down, stay with Irene, and allow us to share in her grief.

Instead, it begins jumping between different points of view. We are introduced to a little girl, Giulia, played phenomenally by Elisabetta Caccamo, who becomes important later on. But rather than allowing her to enter the story organically, the film stops to explain every aspect of her life, from her sick mother to her flawed father, who is torn between his selfish instincts and the responsibilities of parenthood. The problem is that Ferine does this almost every time it introduces someone or something new. Instead of moving forward, it repeatedly steps backward to provide context, interrupting its own momentum before it ever has the chance to build.

Another significant problem is Carolyn Bracken’s technically precise yet lifeless performance, which runs into the same issue I had with her in Oddity. The actress plays the physicality of her role pitch-perfect, contorting her body, howling, unafraid to embrace the absurdities of the script while somehow unable to truly capture who Irene really is. That emotional distance becomes particularly damaging as a great deal of the film relies on the connection she develops with Giulia, which never rings true, especially from Irene’s side. Caccamo gives one of the best young performances I have seen in years and sells her half of that relationship almost entirely on her own.

If failing to truly nail the tragedy the story needs, Corsini at least gets it right in how the film looks and sounds. The film is deeply indebted to the giallos of the 70s while presenting its own unique spin on the genre, setting the horror scenes in daylight while expertly shifting tones and styles. His individual set pieces work far better than his connective tissue, with two attacks particularly standing out: one built around a pair of garden scissors and a later one staged inside a cage, both patient and mean.

In the technical aspects, the visual effects used for the jaguar are very impressive and seamless. The digital jaguar moves with convincing weight and believable animal behavior, which is something easy to overlook. But the movie’s most memorable aspect is Pino Donaggio’s score, which plays a big part in setting the film’s tone and making it stand out. Like his work in Her Private Hell, another Fantasia film, he scores the film like what the film wishes it was instead of what it is, and his characteristically angry strings and melodramatic themes make you wish the film around them were better.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Ferine never lacks ambition, with Corsini clearly wanting to make a horror film about grief, motherhood, and instinct while paying tribute to the Italian genre cinema that inspired him. The individual ingredients are often compelling, and several sequences suggest the stronger film hiding underneath. But it never builds an emotional foundation sturdy enough to support its increasingly bizarre ideas, and characters keep taking over a stretch of the runtime and then disappearing before they add up to anything, so the transformation at its center remains fascinating but never quite affecting. The style is memorable, and Donaggio’s score is excellent, yet none of it is enough to make us care about Irene the way the film needs us to.

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