Directed by Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis
Written by Alessio Rigo de Righi, Matteo Zoppis, and Tommaso Bertani
Starring Gabriele Silli and Maria Alexandra Lungu
Running Time: 1 hour and 45 minutes
Opens April 15 at Lincoln Center

by Ian Hrabe, Staff Writer

Making a slow-paced movie is a delicate art. You can either suck the viewer in like the proverbial frog in the pot of water being brought to a boil, or you can totally ostracize the viewer with dull, plodding plotting. One of 2021’s best films–Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car–is a masterpiece in pacing. The film is three hours long with a short story’s plot and yet the film is engaging wire to wire. It’s the sort of movie where you look at the runtime and wonder how such a seemingly simple story can fit inside that much movie, and by the end you realize the movie could have been five hours long and you’d probably still have loved it because the writing, the characters, and the emotional resonance of that film is so strong.

The Tale of King Crab is the other side of that coin. It’s a film that feels slow for the sake of artiness, has the plot of a microfiction stretched into a feature film, and despite its excellent cinematography and wonderfully expressive lead man Gabriele Silli, it’s a film that desperately wants to have gravitas yet doesn’t invest in the things you need to make a film feel ethereal. It’s slow for the sake of being slow, the whole plot could have been written on a cocktail napkin, and overall it’s the type of movie characters in a broad comedy go to see when they go to see “art cinema” as a gag.

The real problem is that The Tale of King Crab only hints at some interesting ideas. It is essentially a story within a story being told by a bunch of Italian old timers at a bar. It’s a magical realist kind of fable about a drunkard who runs afoul of a local prince and is exiled to Tierra del Fuego where he seeks a hidden cache of gold in lagoon that can only be revealed by slowly following a crab that knows the way back to its ancestral waters. It’s ostensibly a story about redemption, but the story here is barely a skeleton and the characters are paper thin. The look and feel are fine and the actors do a fine job, but without a compelling story it ends up being a total waste of everyone’s time.

Ultimately there is just nothing to hang onto as The Tale of King Crab plods toward its inevitable conclusion. Were this a 20 minute short film the end result would have been much different and I would probably be raving about the vision of co-directors Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis and their lean, beautifully realized fairy tale. Instead the final product is near unwatchable. These days when audiences are being pulled in every direction with so many options, it’s hard to imagine anyone getting 10 minutes into this and deciding to stick it out. There are some excellent moments in the film’s third act–everything picks up once the titular crab comes on the scene–but they can’t justify the total slog that led up to them or the lack of any meaningful payoff.