Tale of Tales

Tale of Tales (Il racconto dei racconti, 2015) is a dark Italian fantasy from director Matteo Garrone, available to watch online on iFILM. The film stars Salma Hayek, Vincent Cassel, Toby Jones, and John C. Reilly across three interwoven stories.

Three kingdoms, three rulers undone by fixation. A queen in Selvascura demands a dragon's heart be cooked and eaten so she can finally conceive — and pays a price she never imagined. A king in Roccaforte becomes so entranced by a woman's singing voice that he refuses to see her face, preferring the fantasy. A third king raises an enormous flea with fatherly devotion, then offers his daughter in marriage to whoever can identify the beast's hide. The source material is Giambattista Basile's 17th-century Neapolitan collection Lo cunto de li cunti — the same book that fed Perrault and the Brothers Grimm.

Garrone shot across Puglia, Calabria and Lazio, and the landscapes carry as much menace as any monster in the frame. This is not a revisionist fairy tale or a knowing wink at the genre — it plays the cruelty straight, which is what makes it work. The film picked up the BAFTA for Best Film Not in the English Language in 2016. Stream Tale of Tales (2015) online on iFILM.