I was taken by the melancholy and the beauty of the film and if this wasn't enough, Colin Firth's performance! His best since "Apartment Zero" and that is saying something. Not a single false move in a film that could very easily become a simple tearjerker. Colin as a dad who takes care of his young daughters after the tragic death of his wife is simply extraordinary. The humanity of his character, flaws and all, is immediately recognisable. The film is filled with an emotional form of suspense that makes the experience utterly unnerving at times. Genova, the city, is photographed with real gusto. The narrow "vicoli" create a sense of dislocation that underlines in the most poetic way the new roads that Colin and his daughters are, not merely finding, but forging for themselves. A delightful surprise.

Colin Firth plays an English lecturer working in the United States. His wife dies in a car crash, and Firth has to look after his two daughters - one a typically sulky and vacuous teenager, the other a girl of 11 or 12 who blames herself for the car accident, and begins to imagine her mother is appearing in her bedroom and talking to her. Firth decides to teach in Genova for a year, and takes the girls with him. The teenager smokes dope (she was doing the same at her mother's funeral reception) and the younger girl continues seeing her dead mother.

Everything in this film is very low key and measured, and there's nothing in it that rebels against common sense, nothing that seems beyond the realms of ordinary human life. The description given by my cable provider called it a 'supernatural drama,' but that it isn't. When the characters begin to wander around the maze of Genoan alleys, getting lost, I feared that the film might turn into a dreadful rehash of 'Don't Look Now,' but luckily no. The teenage girl resents her father's attempt to know where she goes (and who with) every hour of the day. The younger girl is more interesting as a character, and her portrayal of grief is quite moving.

Firth is excellent here, and he acts his part by apparently doing very little. This is exactly the right way of approaching one's part in rather slight 'slice of real life' material like this. If you're expecting 'supernatural' garbage like 'In Dreams' or 'Half Light,' you'll be sadly disappointed. But if you want thoughtful and humane drama, this is for you.

I'm afraid I join the line of people, admittedly quite short, reading the other reviews, who found this movie a waste of my DVD-rental money. Yes, there was tension in wondering if anything would happen to the children whilst wandering around Genoa and, yes, I liked the way in which Michael Winterbottom portrayed the narrow alleyways of that city in the manner of Nicholas Roeg portraying Venice in "Don't Look Now", but that was about it. Unlike other reviewers on IMDb who found it a fine exploration of reaction to grief, I didn't get that feeling from Colin Firth as Joe, nor from his elder daughter Kelly, only from younger daughter Mary. I did hope that her visions of her mother might lead somewhere but, alas, they didn't. Kelly did explode at one point at Mary about how the latter had messed up Kelly's life for the role Mary had played in the death of their mother but by then, it was too late. Perhaps the allusion to "Don't look now" led me to expect something to happen, but nothing ever does. In that respect it joins "Lost in translation" in the list of lauded movies where nothing happens. It stands on a rung above movies where you wonder why well-known actors got involved in the project (To pay the children's'/grandchildrens' school fees?) but this movie is not that much further up the ladder.

"Is that it?" is what my wife and I said to each other as the credits rolled and that is my summary of this movie.