★★★★½
An epic family saga told in muted tones and under one’s breath. That is how one can describe The Mountain Bride (Vermiglio), the sophomore film of writer-director Maura Delpero.
It is a film that prostrates before the first principles of human existence – life, death, and marriage. No family on our green earth is exempt from life’s ceremonies and despairs. No family is not also an epic saga.
Though the setting is divinely beautiful, a small village cradled by the Italian Alps, The Mountain Bride’s characters feel dearly common. They are orthodox subjects for a film about the first principles of our existence.
We imagine these Northern Italian village folk are closest to those most rudimentary aspects of our being, life and death. Women are constantly pregnant into their middle age, grief is painful yet unexceptional, and neither is ever far from their thoughts. They must work to ensure their survival. They bear the growth of the seasons by rote, the brunt of winter and the delights of summer.
One feels, from the film’s opening images, endeared to these family characters not only because they are orthodox, familiar subjects, or village folk draped in white linen in crowded beds.
They endear us because they are deeply unexceptional, as much as any of our lives are unexceptionally affected and organised by the same blooming and recession of life. This film is a rumination on one family saga, one family among millions like it, and derives from Delpero’s own history.
The Mountain Bride follows a large rural family headed by patriarch-educator, Caesar (Tommaso Ragno). His daughters, Lucia, Ada, and Flavia, have increasingly divergent paths in spite of their deep sisterly connection. World War II looms over their village, Vermiglio, nestled in the Italian Alps; Lucia begins a romance with a fugitive soldier, Pietro.
The sisters are compellingly portrayed by three actresses, all making their debut. Flavia is played by Anna Thaler, Ada by Rachele Potrich, and Lucia is played by Martina Scrinzi, a non-professional local actress.
The film premiered at the 81st Venice International Film Festival in 2024. It won the Grand Jury Prize, plus seven awards at the 71st David di Donatella (the Italian Oscars!)
Delpero writes about her work:
“Vermiglio is a landscape of the soul, a ‘Family Lexicon’ that lives inside me, on the threshold of the unconscious, an act of love for my father, his family and their small town. Crossing a personal period, it wants to pay homage to a collective memory.”
While writing the film, Delpero spent time in her grandmother’s house, where her father, aunts and uncles grew up. She spent time in bars and churches in Vermiglio. She dug through family photographs and her own memory.
In the town of Vermiglio, everyone has the same four or five surnames, and Delpero is one of them. In The Mountain Bride, there’s one teacher for a village of children. Everyone has watched everyone grow up or grow old.
The postman personally delivers letters. Daughters and sons are tacitly betrothed to the children of close family friends or those of a vetted villageman. Religious custom punctuates every aspect of their lives. Children ask heavy questions with naivete.
The sounds that resonate out from this tiny shelter are the crying of babes, musical festivity, and Chopin. The landscape is otherwise quiet, particularly during the snow-shuttered winter.
The change of seasons is so delicately impressed by the accomplished director of photography, Mikhail Krichman. The white sunlight and snow, a cool blue tint, and silver nativity trinkets define the season marred by tragedy.
It gives way to brighter, fresher spring-tones with Vivaldi. But quiet resumes, and soft-spokenness shows itself to be not a quality of winter, but a feature of village existence.
Such soft-spokenness indexes an intimacy that seems to be conferred by village life. Reserve is an ineffective shield against eyes that have watched you grow up, with whom you share everything.
Reticence becomes coincident with openness, to the extent that courtship can proceed without speaking. Romantic gestures can be love-note small. One’s heart is never not on one’s sleeve, particularly during wartime.
Village life seems to gift intuition as well, also derived from the great intimacy this life contrives. Ada intuits that she will not be allowed to resume her education before being told, showing an intimacy with both circumstance and with her father.
And with such intimacy also comes the commentary on one’s life by one’s fellows; these characters frequently overwrite another’s suffering. Characters proselytise at a table while another, in the throes of disaster, sits quietly in the corner.
Two sisters openly inquire about the grief of a third, lying in bed between them. Secrets are too, like their father’s cigarettes, not so private and easily recovered. Siblings naturally share their findings with one another.
But their father, too, this non-privacy being a fact of life, shares his gramophone and expensive classical records with his schoolchildren. “Food for the soul,” it is not hidden in a drawer in his office.
The formal language of this film is effectively insistent but unobtrusive. We are moved gently between interior and exterior scenes. The camera is still and restrained, shy but dutiful.
The ruminative tone makes every character alive within their beautiful but silent surrounds. When Ada says, “I would like to be a priest because when you talk, everyone listens to you,” she is at odds with the film, which accords her, and every character, presence and distinctiveness.
Rarely do you leave a film feeling that it has achieved exactly what it set out to do. The eggshell intimacy and plain beauty of this film, and the dignity bestowed on its characters, create something profound, poignant and heart-rending.
The Mountain Bride will not rejuvenate you, but will have a quiet, important conversation with your soul.
The Mountain Bride runs 16 – 22 March as part of Lotterywest Films and Perth Festival. Somerville Auditorium, The University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Hwy, Godroo / Crawley WA 6009.
Tickets: https://www.perthfestival.com.au/program/season-2026/the-mountain-bride-vermiglio
Website: https://www.perthfestival.com.au/program/season-2026/lotterywest-films
Socials: https://www.instagram.com/perthfest/ and https://www.instagram.com/lotterywest/
Watch the trailer below:
Film details:
Title: The Mountain Bride (Vermiglio)
Director: Maura Delpero
Cast: Tommaso Ragno, Giuseppe De Domenico, Roberta Rovelli, Martina Scrinzi
Country of Origin: Italy
Duration: 120 mins
Rating: M
