The Last Alchemist (2012)
★½ — The Last Alchemist (2012)
San Marino is one of the smallest sovereign states in the world, a landlocked republic of fewer than 35,000 people perched atop a mountain in central Italy. It produces very little in the way of cinema, which makes The Last Alchemist (2012) something of a curio in itself: a short film that can legitimately claim San Marino as part of its national identity, even if its production leans heavily on Italian infrastructure and personnel. The film runs to just thirty minutes, placing it firmly in short-film territory, and it arrives from director Michele Massari with a premise that sits somewhere between occult thriller and folk horror. Seven young women face sacrifice at the hands of an ancient alchemist named Felix, kept alive across centuries through ritual, and the only people standing between them and that fate are a policeman off duty and a deaf-mute teenager called Lara. On paper, it is the kind of lean, high-concept setup that short-form genre filmmaking can actually suit rather well (there is less time to overstay a welcome), though whether the execution matches the ambition is quite another question.
Massari is not a household name, and the production details here are modest, to put it charitably. No studio credit is attached to the project, and the budget, whatever it may have been, was clearly not lavish. That said, the film does carry one name that gives it genuine weight: Franco Nero, the Italian screen icon whose career spans over five decades and hundreds of films. Nero built much of his international reputation through genre work, most famously in the spaghetti western tradition (you can read more about one of his most celebrated performances in Django (1966)), but he has remained a working actor of considerable presence long beyond those early landmark roles. Here, alongside Claudia Gaffuri and Fabio Galli, he takes the kind of part that leans on authority and weathered charisma rather than physical spectacle. Whether a short film from a micro-budget co-production is the best use of that charisma is a fair question to sit with before pressing play.
Short genre films from smaller European nations occupy a peculiar space in film culture. They are rarely reviewed, seldom widely distributed, and often end up as festival programme entries or online curiosities rather than anything with a conventional release. In that sense, The Last Alchemist belongs to a tradition of ambitious-but-constrained filmmaking that turns up across the decade, a period when digital production tools lowered the barrier to entry considerably without always solving the harder problems of script, design and resources. It shares that decade with a range of short and mid-range international films, from the wordless animated drama The OceanMaker (2014) to the stripped-back Luigi (2013), each finding its own way to work within tight limitations. As a thriller, it also invites comparison to films that use ritual and supernatural dread as their engine, a sub-genre that has produced some genuinely unsettling work, as anyone who has seen Menace II Society (1993) will know, even if that film operates in an entirely different register.
A-Z World Movie Tour San Marino The Last Alchemist. A 2012 short from San Marino starring Franco Nero looks and feels like a film that had one good idea and ran it into the ground with very little budget to back it up. Look, Franco Nero is a legend, and his presence alone gives the thing a flicker of credibility. He delivers his lines with gravitas, like he’s in some epic mystery, even when the script demands he talk about ancient secrets while standing in what looks like a repurposed storage unit with mood lighting. The story tries to be cryptic and profound (a dying alchemist, a final experiment, a twist involving time and legacy) but the execution is painfully cheap. The sets, the costumes, the green screen work, it all screams low-budget without the charm of so-bad-it’s-good. There’s a fun little nod to LOST with a Dharma Initiative-style crate in the background, which gave me a chuckle, but that’s about it for enjoyment. The twist almost makes sense in a X-Files episode kind of way. But by then, I was too distracted to care. It’s not evil, just undercooked and under-resourced. Franco Nero’s commitment deserves something, even if the rest of it doesn’t. Watch it for curiosity’s sake, maybe once, then forget it.
It is a shame, really, because the central hook is not without merit. An ageless alchemist, a cave ritual, a race against ancient ceremony: in more confident hands, or with even a modest step up in production value, that could have been a tight, atmospheric half-hour. As it stands, though, I found myself watching it more as an artefact than as a film, interested in what it was trying to do rather than caught up in whether it would succeed. Franco Nero doing his level best in a repurposed storage unit with green screen smoke is, I suppose, a sentence I never expected to write, but here we are. Some films earn their cult status through being gloriously bad; this one just sits in an awkward middle ground, neither bad enough to be fun nor good enough to be satisfying. Worth the thirty minutes if you are the sort of person who likes to say you have seen a film from San Marino. Beyond that, probably not.
Rating: ★½ | Year: 2012 | Watched: 2025-08-29
Related on Movies With Macca
More with Franco Nero: Django (1966)
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