Francesca D'Aloja

New Year's Eve at "The Islands" condos. As midnight approaches, each group in the condos draws closer to grotesque tragedy.

Francesco and Marta are married, and they run a small design company in Rome. When Francesco's long forgotten aunt, Anita, dies in Istanbul, he travels there to look after the sale of the hamam he inherited. There, he meets the family who runs the hamam, gets attracted to one of them and to the whole Turkish atmosphere, and so he decides not to sell the hamam.

Inspired by real events in the Rome of the late 1970s, early 1980s which are chronicled in the evocatively-titled book The Clockwork Orange Gang, Scent of the Night marked Caligari's comeback with a bang. His belated and much-awaited follow-up to Toxic Love polarized and baffled critics and audiences alike, who seemingly couldn't cope with his reboot of the poliziottesco (Italo cop movie) from the 1970s. A real shame, because Caligari elevates a fast-moving thriller about the violent street-and-home-robbery career of a former policeman and his gang-mates to a poignant social-political metaphor. Featuring an iconic performance by Valerio Mastrandrea and interspersed with cinéphile homages ranging from Melville to Bresson, Scent of the Night is the ultimate Italian cult movie of the 1990s. A politically incorrect indictment of a time when the seeds of the vapid hedonism of the Berlusconi age were sown.