When Film Fandom Starts Rewriting Reality

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MOVIE REVIEW
City Wide Fever
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Genre: Horror, Comedy, Mystery
Year Released: 2025, 2026
Runtime: 1h 13m
Director(s): Josh Heaps
Writer(s): Josh Heaps
Cast: Diletta Guglielmi, Angelica Kim, Rutanya Alda, Onur Tukel, Larry Fessenden, Douglas Buck
Where to Watch: plays The Alamo Drafthouse nationwide on April 15, 2026, as part of their Weird Wednesday Series, followed by a digital release on May 1st and a Blu-ray available for pre-order

RAVING REVIEW: A film student picks up a discarded USB drive and finds herself chasing the legacy of a forgotten Italian horror director, but CITY WIDE FEVER isn’t really about solving that mystery. It’s about what happens when someone starts treating movies like a map of reality and keeps following them long after they stop making sense. From the start, the film positions obsession as the driving force, not logic, and everything that follows builds off that choice.

CITY WIDE FEVER is built from a very specific idea; it examines the structure and motivations of 70s giallo and forces them through a modern, stripped-down, digital filmmaking approach. That’s not just aesthetic here; it’s the film's entire identity. Writer/director Josh Heaps isn’t recreating a genre entry so much as translating it into something more different, rough, and unstable. According to the director’s own framing, this is about running those classic tropes, like violence, sexuality, and stylization, through a fragmented contemporary lens, and the film sticks to that mission from beginning to end.

This is not trying to win over casual viewers. It’s targeting people who already live inside this kind of cinema, the people who recognize the structure, the references, and the way tone can shift without warning. The film assumes familiarity with this iconic genre and builds on it, which makes it feel confident even when it’s chaotic.

Diletta Guglielmi carries the film as Sam, and the performance works best when it leans into fixation rather than panic. She doesn’t react like someone trapped in a traditional horror movie. Instead, she keeps pushing forward, even when the situation is clearly escalating past control. That choice reinforces that this isn’t fear-driven behavior; it’s curiosity turning into something harder to stop.

The structure follows a loose path, but it never locks into the idea that it’s a detective story. Each step forward introduces more instability rather than clarity, and the film gradually shifts from something grounded to something more fractured. There’s a deliberate point at which reality stops feeling reliable, and the film doesn’t try to correct it. It leans into it.

Visually, the film takes risks, but it knows what it’s doing. From the first frame, this is something nostalgic that will either work for you or not. The SD camera, the 4:3 framing, and the overall low-resolution presentation aren’t just budgetary decisions; they’re baked into the film's design. The image has a harsh, flattened quality that strips away polish and replaces it with something closer to surveillance footage or found footage. It doesn’t look like traditional giallo, but it does recreate the feeling of watching something you weren’t supposed to see.

Where CITY WIDE FEVER becomes the most interesting is in how it treats cinephilia. This isn’t a straightforward celebration of film culture. It’s more like a critique, or at least an acknowledgment that an obsession with media can reshape how people interpret reality. Sam isn’t just studying the forgotten giallo director Saturnino Barresi's work; she’s internalizing it, and the film reflects that by slowly adopting the logic of the genre she’s immersing herself in.

There’s also a strong sense of place that helps ground everything. The film was shot entirely in New York without permits, and that decision shows up on screen. The city feels unfiltered, not staged or stylized, but captured as-is and then slightly pushed out of alignment. It gives the film a raw authenticity that counters the heightened genre elements, creating a tension between realism and exaggeration.

Tone is another area where the film takes risks. It moves between horror, dark comedy, and something closer to a surreal character study without clearly separating those ideas. When it works, it keeps the film unpredictable. When it doesn’t, it can feel like the film is shifting gears without committing to any one direction.

There’s a clear sense of intention behind everything here. This isn’t a film that ends up rough by accident. It’s designed that way, both out of necessity and as a creative choice. The DIY approach, the texture, the fragmented structure, it all ties back to the same idea of translating genre through a modern, low-fi lens.

CITY WIDE FEVER is built for a specific audience, and if you’re in that audience, the film delivers exactly what it promises. It’s uneven, but it’s also deliberate, and that combination makes it more interesting than a lot of cleaner, safer genre work. This feels less like a finished statement and more like a filmmaker establishing their voice in real time. There’s ambition here, and while not all of it works, enough of it does to make the film worth engaging with, especially if you’re already tuned into what it’s trying to do.

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[photo courtesy of FACTORY 25]

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