The Last Alchemist (2012)

Franco Nero is a legend. Full stop. The man carries decades of screen presence with him wherever he goes, and even in something as thin as The Last Alchemist, you can feel him trying his absolute best. He delivers every line like he's in the middle of some grand, sweeping mystery. Gravitas turned up to full. It's genuinely impressive, and it makes what surrounds him all the more frustrating to sit through.

This is a 2012 short from San Marino, made as part of my ongoing A-Z World Movie Tour, and the honest truth is that San Marino deserved better representation than this. The premise has potential: a dying alchemist, ancient secrets, a final experiment, a twist about time and legacy. On paper, that's a perfectly serviceable little mystery, the kind of thing that could work well as a tightly wound short. But the execution is painfully undercooked, and no amount of Nero's commitment can paper over the cracks.

The production is rough. The sets look like a repurposed storage unit dressed up with mood lighting and a few candles. The costumes are doing their best. The green screen work is the kind that pulls you right out of any atmosphere the film is trying to build. And here's the thing: I don't automatically hold a low budget against a film. I've seen plenty of scrappy, cheap productions that compensate with ingenuity, wit or sheer energy. Think of Nightmare City (1980), which runs purely on chaotic momentum and doesn't care one bit that it looks knocked together. The Last Alchemist has none of that infectious energy. It just looks cheap without the compensating charm.

There's a moment that genuinely made me laugh, though. Sitting in the background of one shot is what looks unmistakably like a Dharma Initiative-style crate, straight out of LOST. Whether that was intentional or just a happy accident, I genuinely cannot tell you, but it gave me the only real spark of enjoyment in the whole runtime. The film accidentally became a crossover for about three seconds, and those were the best three seconds of the experience.

The twist, when it arrives, almost lands. There's an X-Files episode lurking somewhere in the DNA of this story, a slightly paranormal, slightly philosophical idea about what an alchemist's true legacy might be. It nearly makes sense, and in a different, better-resourced production, it might even have been satisfying. But by the time we get there, I was too disconnected to care. The journey to the twist hadn't earned the payoff.

It's not unwatchable. It's not offensive. It's not even particularly memorable in the way that a truly terrible film can become memorable. It's just undercooked and under-resourced, a one-idea short that didn't have the means or the script to fully realise that idea. Nero was a magnetic screen presence as far back as Django (1966), and watching him here, you're constantly reminded that he's giving this far more than it deserves.

Watch it once if curiosity or completionism drags you there. It's short enough that you won't lose much time. But don't go in expecting anything beyond the faint, flickering credibility that one committed actor can bring to material that simply isn't up to his level.

One and a half stars.

Rating: ★½  | Year: 2012  | Watched: 2025-08-29

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