A popular item at international fantastic film festivals for the last year, The Forbidden City presumes to mount an action-packed kung fu extravaganza set in Rome, and for most of the first half lives up to the promise, but it’s an Italian production and refuses to give up any part of that country’s hallowed cinematic sensibility. The premise may feel beside the point to anyone with any knowledge about recent Chinese history. A family in rural China hides its second daughter, Mei, from the authorities because, at the time, the one-child policy was in effect. Mei is locked away while her older sister, Yun, leads a normal life. Cut to some 20 years later and Mei (Liu Yaxi) is searching for Yun in Italy, where Yun has apparently been trafficked after seeking work to help her parents pay off a debt that has something to do with the one-child policy, even if it’s no longer being enforced. This disconnect is never explained, but Mei seeks the same sort of work in order to trace her sister’s whereabouts and finds herself “auditioning” for a sex worker gig in the labyrinthine basement of a Chinese restaurant called the Forbidden City in the foreign quarter of Rome. Instead she breaks out the kung fu moves her martial arts expert father taught her in lockdown as a child and handily vanquishes all comers.

This opening fight scene is fast and furious and funny. It’s the best thing in the movie, which means the director, Gabriele Mainetti, blows most of his wad right at the start, and the rest of the film doesn’t quite maintain the same level of excitement. Thanks to an older woman who works in the brothel under the restaurant, Mei finds out Yun has married one of her customers, the owner of a rival restaurant located nearby. As it turns out, this other restaurant is run not by a bloodthirsty triad-like organization but a family of earthy Italians whose paterfamilias has run away with Yun, leaving his wife, Lorella (Sabrina Ferilli), at the hands of his unscrupulous best friend, Hannibal (Marco Giallini), while his put-upon chef son, Marcello (Enrico Borello), struggles to run the place on his own, something he never really envisioned. Mei, of course, is not interested in this gnarly domestic situation but has to put up with it in order to find Yun and, when push comes to kick, carry out the revenge scheme that all great kung fu movies—or spaghetti westerns, for that matter—stake their mojo on. 

Though the suitably depraved villain, Forbidden City owner Wang (Chunyu Shanshan), makes a formidable adversary, the movie becomes mired in the emotional complications of Marcello’s beef with Hannibal regarding the future of the family business and the latter’s exploitative relationship with the immigrant underground of Rome, the result being that the remaining fight scenes provide diminishing returns in relation to the operatic melodrama of the intergenerational conflict as the two modes of entertainment vie for Mainetti’s attention. His lack of solid commitment to either causes his mind to wander, thus leading to a long, gratuitous homage to Roman Holiday. And that’s a shame because Liu is a real talent as a martial artist, though not so much as an actor.

A similar clash of genre prerogatives characterizes the action in the latest Osgood Perkins’ thriller Keeper. As with Perkins’ previous two movies, Daddy Longlegs and The Monkey, Keeper is a horror movie whose bloody outcomes are driven by supernatural forces. What made those earlier movies successful in their own right was Perkins’ refusal to explain the spooky premises behind the terrors. Here he goes to painful lengths to create a kind of alternate reality where the bad things are supposed to make sense, but, in the end, don’t.

Tatiana Maslany plays Liz, a painter spending her first weekend alone with her new doctor boyfriend, Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland), at Malcolm’s expansive, remote, high-end family vacation house-in-the-woods. Actually, they aren’t completely alone. Next door lives Malcolm’s eccentric cousin, Darren (Birkette Turton), who makes an unsettling entrance one day with his own new girlfriend, a Russian model named Minka (Eden Weiss) who doesn’t speak any English. At first, Darren’s strong suit as a negative plot element is that he’s infinitely annoying, though whether it’s due more to his creepy behavior or to his terrible lines (“Don’t let this one get away,” he says conspiratorily to Malcolm) is difficult to tell. Liz is already feeling uncomfortable for reasons that have more to do with the ambience of the house than Darren or Malcolm, whose own behavior starts getting weird when Liz refuses to eat some cake left by the housekeeper because she doesn’t like chocolate. “I thought all women liked chocolate,” he says, clearly peeved and, for the viewer at least, giving much of the game away. As the title suggests, the plot’s main subtext is two people seriously trying to make a go of their relationship after obviously failing in previous ones, a theme that’s squandered in order to make room for scares. 

A sort of enhanced atmospheric vagueness persists for the bulk of the movie, and while Osgood, thanks mainly to Maslany’s way with a startled look or a stifled cry, manages to conjure up a general mood of something about to go terribly wrong, he couches it all in tableaux that split the difference between hallucinatory and suggestively paranoid, but without building tension. Eventually, he breaks down and explains what’s going on in a rush of confused exposition that feels patched together, undermining the horror set pieces that have been hastily shoved to the end.

The Forbidden City, in Italian and Mandarin, opens May 29 in Tokyo at Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011).

Keeper opens May 29 in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608).

The Forbidden City home page in Japanese

Keeper home page in Japanese

The Forbidden City photo (c) 2025 Wildside S.R.L. – Goon Films S.R.L. – Piper Film S.R.L.

Keeper photo (c) 2025 Shadowless Horse Pictures Inc.