questions


great film..............only just a few questions..........with spoilers so please dont read unles youve seen the film...........



SPOILERS..........














1/what was hanging in that bag in the attic?
2/did the sisters kill the painter before putting him in the formaldehyde as the coroner said the body was unrecognisable and presumably buried. Was this one of their victims and if so how did the painter really die?
3/was the painting of the naked lady we saw in the mayors house really one of the sisters and not a self portrait?
4/what were the townspeople hiding? if the sisters were murdering their own then why not arrest them? why the cover up? obviously the police knew something was going on as that drunk man escaped.

SO many questions and the ending was a shock! Talk about The league of gentleman and Tubbs!!

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The dead body in formaldehyde was the painter's. He was severely burned so he died, but his sisters did not wanted to bury him in a churchyard, maybe because they wanted to keep townspeople scared.
The townspeople were hiding because they were frightened by the two sisters' revenge and they feared that give publicity to murders could drive tourists away from the town.

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I think that giving a single concrete reason for the village's silence is too simple for the movie. You can think that the peasants are actually scared by the two old ladies, who they probably consider whitches or something. In this sense, fear, ignorance and superstition, or the very Italian tendency to mind one's own businnes, can be the reasons. But I think the director intended to leave this point unclear, in order to make the whole atmosphere scarier.


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Now that you mention it, the person in the portrait Stefano sees at the Mayor's House was the Priest.

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1/ I presume you mean Roberto Leagani
2/ I believe this was their way of keeping him "alive" (in their minds at least).
3/ it was a painting of the sister who acts as the priest as is meant as a clue for the audience.
4/Fear. Like in Jaws almost - why mess with the tourist season when the evil has only taken a local toal plus the fact the sisters obviously chose targets who were from more deprived social classes. This may be a more direct social message from Avati regarding how Italy treats it's colonies (hence the sister's backstories) with the abuse of the Italian state om foreign soil expressed in microcosm in the film.

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I just watched this last night and realized a few things that may help with all the questions on this board:

Legnani and his family went to Brazil where their mother died and the family brought back a savage religion. One of the sisters is the priest and maybe all the townspeople were converted to that religion. Legnani thought he could communicate with the dead by painting death. The sisters were trying to bring him back by using fresh victims as they had before he died. I think Solmi was trying to revitalize the town with tourism by restoring the painting. The mayor's wife was a disciple of Legnani and collected his paintings as well as leaving the flowers on the altar.

This doesn't explain everything and maybe it's because many things are left open for the viewer's own interpretation.

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