Tale of Tales

A queen's desperate obsession with bearing a child leads her to consume a sea monster's heart, setting off a chain of dark and fantastical consequences. Interweaving three separate stories drawn from Giambattista Basile's seventeenth-century fairy tales, the film follows a monarch who becomes dangerously fixated on two mysterious old women, a king whose neglect of his daughter leads her into a monstrous marriage, and the grief-stricken queen whose magical son forms an inseparable bond with his albino twin. Garrone presents these narratives as lush, often brutal fables in which desire, vanity, and longing bring ruin to those who cannot master them.