I don’t have a lot to say about the movie that I’m going to go see tomorrow night. One of the theatres that shows Art House type movies is showing La Sconosciuta (The Unknown Woman). The director is Giuseppe Tornatore who also directed Cinema Paradiso which is one of the many movies I have never gotten around to watching yet own.

Has anyone seen or heard anything about this one? The trailer looks pretty interesting. I’ll throw a review up later in the week but until then here is the synopsis and the trailer.

When we first meet Irena, a young Ukrainian immigrant alone in a bustling Italian city, she is fixated on getting a housekeeping job at a nondescript apartment building. Money is clearly not her motivation; she rents an expensive flat just across the plaza where, from her window, she spies on an unsuspecting family living in one of the building’s sprawling apartments. The doorman, smitten by Irena’s worn beauty, gets her a job scrubbing the floors of the building’s vertiginous spiral staircase. It’s there that Irena calculatedly befriends Gina, the family’s maid, and learns more about the lives of Valeria and Donato Adacher, high-end jewelers whose frayed marriage seems on the verge of collapse. Their only child, Thea, suffers from a rare condition that has robbed her of such crucial defense mechanisms as the instinct to put her hands out when she falls.

Stopping at nothing to insert herself into the Adachers’ lives, Irena finally succeeds in taking Gina’s place as maid and nanny to the fragile Thea, with whom she develops a powerful bond. But as Valeria begins to suspect something isn’t right about their devoted housekeeper, Irena’s violent past resurfaces. As secrets from her past threaten to swallow them all, the final strands of a web of murder and deceit come together to reveal the shocking truth behind Irena’s connection to the Adachers.

The Unknown Woman [ 0:01 | 10.19 MB ] Play Now | Play in Popup