‘City Wide Fever’ Is a Love Letter to Giallo

​​I’m no film historian. I watch stuff with the neutrality of a blank slate. I never see twists coming — I don’t go into movies trying to map them out, I just watch with an open mind. Have I seen Bergman, Kurosawa, and Fellini movies? I have. To quote Rob Gordon in High Fidelity: “I’m not the smartest guy in the world, but I’m certainly not the dumbest.” I go into movies hoping to understand the plot, to get something out of the experience. Having just watched first time director Josh Heaps’ City Wide Fever, the movie firmly goes in my “weird shit” file.

Did I understand City Wide Fever? Nope. It looked cool.

City Wide Fever, out in Alamo theaters nationwide, hangs on Sam (Diletta Guglielmi), a giallo-obsessed film student who goes from curious nerd to full-blown conspiracist after latching onto the myth of a forgotten Italian director. What starts as film-geek curiosity quickly curdles into something uglier, as Sam inserts herself into a mystery that doesn’t want her there. The deeper she digs, the more the movie leans into that classic black-gloved killer energy, with reality and genre fantasy bleeding together until you’re not sure if she’s solving something or just losing her shit. It’s less about logic and more about obsession eating itself alive. Actors are swapped out mid movie, scenes change within a fraction of a second, a killer is not the killer, there’s some lesbian make-outs, a girl in a wheelchair breaks into a third floor apartment saying that she “ran away.”

For the uninitiated, giallo is all black gloves, stylized kills, and plots that make less sense the more you think about them. It was a stylish, highly violent Italian subgenre of murder mystery-thriller that arrived in the 1960s, growing and developing through the 1980s: Think Mario Bava and Dario Argento. Heaps’ first feature is clearly not meant for big theaters but for the folks who want an experience of what a movie can be without the boundaries of traditional story, relying instead on instinct and dread – a pivotal scene takes place at a magical porn shop.

The rest of the cast orbits Sam like they’ve wandered in from different movies — part of the film’s charm, but also its limitation. The kills are quick and mostly underwhelming. We see them but then they’re seemingly random. People die and then others who were a part of the story vanish from the plot. This has the effect of rendering the plot almost an afterthought, which feels like a budget reality hoping it gets seen as a bold anti-horror move.

Where the film actually works is in its grime. Shot on analog video, the movie looks like something you’d find on a tape at the bottom of a milk crate, all smeared edges and strange vibes. It commits hard to the bit — surreal, messy, occasionally bewildering — but when it clicks, it feels like a love letter to giallo made by someone who’s watched way too many of them alone in the dark.

Comedian Ian Fidance makes a cameo as an Uber driver with a monologue that feels entirely off the cuff — and then Sam is suddenly walking in the woods, and then someone is getting stabbed. City Wide Fever does not hold your hand. It does not owe you an explanation. That’s either the point or the problem, and honestly, maybe both?

City Wide Fever is not for casual horror fans looking for clean kills and a tight story. This is for the film weirdos — the folks who like their movies messy, confusing, and a lot off-putting. It’s something you experience rather than watch. It was entertaining from a visual perspective. It’s an hour of your life to contemplate what giallo is or at least really interesting movies that was nothing like what plays at the cineplex, which has it’s own merit. I can’t tell you if it’s good or bad. I can tell you I’ve never seen anything quite like it, and there’s always merit in that.