If you’ve ever thought, You know what Venice needs? Less gondolas and more Antichrist pregnancies, then congratulations—you are the exact target audience for Ugo Liberatore’s Damned in Venice. For the rest of us, this Italian horror is less a film and more a cautionary tale about what happens when you pour Catholic guilt, sleazy Eurotrash atmosphere, and a dash of Rosemary’s Baby into the canal and watch it sink.
The Setup
We meet Mark, a teenage blind boy who has “disturbing visions”—a phrase that here means “the plot needs an excuse for psychic exposition.” He lives with his icy blonde sister Christine and a grandmother whose strict religious streak could have qualified her as the Pope’s attack dog. Grandma doesn’t make it far—Mark accidentally kills her in a freak accident, setting the tone for a movie where most deaths feel like they could be avoided with basic safety precautions and a non-haunted living situation.
The Descent Into Weirdness
After Grandma’s departure, the siblings move into their aunt and uncle’s Venice hotel, which is about as cheerful as a funeral home on a rainy Tuesday. Aunt dies, uncle commits suicide, and instead of selling the building, Christine turns it into a brothel—because naturally the best way to cope with family tragedy is to open a small business venture specializing in sex work for haunted tourists.
Then Christine gets pregnant, despite being “a virgin,” though her newfound sadism toward Mark suggests this is less divine miracle and more hellish HR violation.
The Supporting Cast of Woe
Mark teams up with Giorgio, Christine’s ex, to figure out what’s going on. Their suspect list includes “Dan,” a mysterious guest with the energy of a man who keeps a pet snake and says it’s “misunderstood.” Father Stefani, a Catholic priest, also takes an interest—because in these films priests always know the apocalypse is coming but somehow never do anything until it’s already RSVP’d.
The Atmosphere
The movie wants to be a moody, religious-tinged horror like The Omen, but Venice—usually a gorgeous cinematic backdrop—is shot here like the world’s dampest hostage situation. The pacing is glacial, which would be fine if the suspense built to something truly diabolical. Instead, we get long stretches of Mark wandering around looking confused (fair, given the script) and Christine transitioning from icy sibling to full-on evil queen without much in the way of subtlety.
The Grand Satanic Payoff
By the time we’re supposed to be fearing for humanity’s future, you’re more worried about how many more minutes are left. The whole Antichrist angle is handled like a subplot the filmmakers forgot to flesh out until the third act. The final sequences do deliver a touch of unsettling imagery, but it’s buried under so much melodrama you half expect someone to start slapping people and shouting, “Pull yourself together!”
Final Judgment
Damned in Venice is a cocktail of half-baked supernatural dread, awkward family drama, and questionable business ventures, garnished with a lemon twist of blasphemy. It’s never quite scary, but it is the kind of strange, sleazy curio that cult horror fans may mine for unintentional laughs.
