Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Binding’ on Netflix, an Italian Horror Flick Full of All the Usual Scares

Halloweeners are in (sacrificial) hog heaven in October, and Netflix is happy to oblige them with stuff like The Binding, a supernatural creeper about dabblings in witchy occultishness and all that jazz. The movie is the feature debut of director Domenico Emanuele de Feudis, who’s Italian, which brings to mind Fulci and Argento, his influential filmmaker countrymen. Let’s see if he lives up to their legacy.

THE BINDING: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: It begins with screaming. Lots of screaming. Screaming, over the too many production-company logos we always see at the beginnings of movies. There’s people around a fire in a putrid catacomb, and a subjugate woman who shatters a mirror just by looking at it. Then, the scariest thing happens: we see A SCREENFUL OF EXPOSITORY TEXT. AHHHHHHHHHHHH! Consider our blood curdled. It’s some old blither-blather about ancient bewitchings in southern Italy and I can confirm, speaking as someone who watched the entirety of the film that follows, it’s not at all important.

Cut to a Volvo wagon cruising the highway. Inside are Francesco (Riccardo Scamarcio), his fiancee Emma (Mia Maestro) and her seven-or-eightish-year-old daughter Sofia (Giulia Patrignani). It’s a meet-the-parent sitch, as Emma has yet to meet her future mother-in-law (Mariella Lo Sardo), who lives in southern Italy in a gigantic home isolated in the middle of the woods with her dog and Sabrina (Raffaella D’Avella) who might be her housekeeper or friend or merely just her partner in making weird prayer-incantations about “PRECIOUS BLOOD” over weird potions. Anyway, the house hasn’t seen a fresh coat of paint in a century, and there’s some seeping mold up in the corner and the first thing Sofia sees is a crow pecking at another bird’s corpse. This is all surely just the local color, not an ominous harbinger of ridiculous insane things to happen. Carry on, then.

So of course in a house like this there’s all manner of noises occurring at night — thumping, moaning, groaning, hissing, etc. — but it’s surely just the wind. Things start going to heck in a shitbasket when Sofia peers under her bed and is bitten by a tarantula the size of a Denny’s Grand Slam platter, prompting Mom and Sabrina to open the arachnopharmacological potion cabinet and mix up some wormswort and beetleknee and houndstooth or whatever. It’s just one of her “herbal concoctions,” Francesco says. OK then! She doesn’t need a doctor, she’ll be fine, no worries. But. The seeping mold seems to be getting visibly worse in a small amount of time, the dog keeps barking at random trees and Sofia not only starts ripping out her hair and using it to bind together some evil twigs like she’s prepping for the occultist craft bazaar, but she’s also looking gaunt and sweating a lot and is it me or are her eyes all milky and her skin all extra-veiny? Eh, it’s probably nothing.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Just because De Feudis borrows from Rosemary’s Baby, The Witch, The Exorcist, and various possession thrillers doesn’t mean his film is any good.

Performance Worth Watching: I’m pretty sure the sound effects editor was paid 10 bucks for every ludicrous noise they created, and was able to buy a brand new Toyota Camry with the dough.

Memorable Dialogue: “This place is magnificent,” Emma says of the home and its wooded surroundings. To which Mom replies with not-at-all loaded dialogue, “Thank you. It’s everything I have. It took so many sacrifices.”

Sex and Skin: Francesco and Emma experience coitus interruptus when she thinks someone is watching them through the door that they left open, possibly because Italy is more liberal when it comes to sex? Anyway, we’re not sure if anyone was watching them, and it doesn’t matter, because nothing comes of it, and the scene ends up being wholly pointless.

Our Take: MOTHERS-IN-LAW. Sheesh. Amirite? Sh-boom. Rimshot!

Anyway, dumb movie. Did you know that “binding indicates a psychic condition of impediment or inhibition and a sense of domination, determined by a powerful malign influence, which affects a person’s autonomy and capacity to decide and choose. Binding, commonly known as the evil eye, is carried out through magic rituals that establish the binding between victim and practitioner.” Well, that’s what this movie was about. (Admittedly, I copied it from the movie’s opening text.) Me, I thought it was about evil twigs. If the first season of True Detective was unofficially Evil Antlers: The Series, then The Binding is Evil Twigs: The Movie. Evil twigs are tied together and then spooky dookie happens. Without the twigs, our protagonists might have had a perfectly nice weekend of familial bonding, maybe a little authentic SoItal herbal tea, but no. The twigs, they will not be denied.

The Binding is a would-be atmospheric thriller that’s paced like an open sore oozing pus and inundated with ridiculous sound effects. In every dull, idea-barren horror movie there’s inevitably a Something that turns up in the third act that moves its body with the crackly-bones noise that sounds like you’re splitting open a baked chicken with your bare hands. It’s like in action movies when a knife makes that metal-on-metal SHWINGG sound as it moves through the relatively frictionless air. It’s just silly as the dickens.

I digress. The movie is full of cliches and wispy-thin characters — characters who, when they’re in a giant creaky house, inevitably walk… very… slowly… through the rooms, just eating up the run time, the scenes gorging on minutes like a baleen whale at the all-you-can-eat krill buffet. There’s a scene in which there’s a shriek and one character runs into the room and a second character runs in and actually turns the light on, which is revolutionary logic for a movie like this. Otherwise, the rest of the movie is twigs, and stuff that was done much better in other movies.

Our Call: SKIP IT. The Binding is business as usual for horror films that are content to lure us into boredom with the promise of a few scares.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream The Binding on Netflix