Indie Movie The Tale Of King Crab Is A Brilliantly Maudlin Tale Of Great Loss, New Hope And A King Crab Navigator

There are ways to tell tales, and then there are Italians. Maria Alexandra Lungu as Emma, a forlorn rebel who enjoys wine, equally forlorn men, and song. All photos courtesy of The Tale Of King Crab IMDb

The film opens in the rainy, rolling hills of modern-day Italy, where a group of old country farmers gathers together for a dinner of traditional spaghetti and the retelling of old Italian legends. Basically, a high-carb BS session among friends, and it is a thing of beauty to watch even with the subtitles.

As the farmers eat and drink the evening away, they sing bits of old songs about the old country when one of them brings up an often reimagined story of a long-dead doctor who had lived in a little Italian town with an adult son named Luciano who had a nervous breakdown and became the town drunk, bringing shame to the family name. They talk about some dishonorable misdeed he had done against the town prince during the festival of Saint Orsi, and how no one really knows what happened to him after his great sin.

The film then cuts to the early 1900s in the little town where everything happened, and gently walks you through the life of Luciano, from his depression and drunken exploits to his courting of Emma, the daughter of a wealthy sheep farmer and someone who he can relate to. Both characters are rebels at heart, but both struggle with emotional and substance abuse issues which gets Luciano in trouble with the Prince and Emma in trouble with her father so the Prince tries to have Luciano assassinated on the eve of the festival while the Prince’s hired guards run off with Emma who is never seen alive again. So what does a badly wounded loser whose love is extinguished by a corrupt ruler go out and do? You apparently burn his castle to the ground, have your Dad smooth things over with the townspeople and then take off for Argentina to look for gold. Bit of an extreme looking gap year but why not.

Screenshot of the very dead captain courtesy of me. Do I really need to credit myself? Also if some shady guy offers your water in a green bottle while you’re all roaming around an island nicknamed the “Asshole Of The World” decline politely and stick with the rum.

The film then cuts back to the farmers who go on about Luciano needing to leave the town, arguing for and against his exile, and that, again, no one knows what happened to him but that of course didn’t stop anyone from positing what happened to him.

Luciano heads down and out to Argentina to search for lost gold among the wreckage of an infamous Spanish galleon in an effort to make his fortune and reinvent himself. Along the way, he changes his identity and finds himself kidnapped by an old, delirious captain and his crew who think Luciano knows where the gold is and who are the first people to discover the priest’s only friend, a large King Crab he keeps in a bucket filled with salt water who, when taken out of the bucket and put on the ground, acts as a navigator by walking towards the area where the gold is supposedly hidden. In the process of all this, both Luciano and the crab become targets of the kidnappers who eventually all die during a shootout between themselves. Luciano is also mortally wounded but in his death, he is reunited with Emma in the afterlife, except she isn’t exactly happy about it, I think.

The film is beautifully shot with lots of gorgeous, dream-like landscapes and intimate captures of powerful emotional and physical interactions between the characters. For at least half of the film, the subtitles keep up and reveal a sad but engaging storyline that shows what living with depression in an age where there was nothing you could do about it was like, but in the second half of the movie, they are sporadic at best which means that either the entire movie’s storyline is brilliant or just the first 45 minutes but I’m staying positive here. If you’re in the mood for something sad, gritty, funny and yet slightly confusing unless you speak Italian and Spanish fluently check out The Tale Of King Crab’s IMDB on where to watch the film.