The Tearsmith – Needlessly Emo, Brace for Rueful Tears
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Director: Alessandro Genovesi
Writers: Erin Doom, Eleonora Fiorini, Alessandro Genovesi
The trailer for the 2024 Neflix movie “The Tearsmith” (Original title: Fabbricante di lacrime) promises a steamy fantasy ‘forbidden’ romance between two unrelated orphan teenagers, but the end product doesn’t match up to the ad. Despite repeated mentions of fairy-tales and wolves, there’s no fantasy element in the film, it unfolds like “Twilight” fan-fiction minus the vampires and werewolves.
The plot follows Nica Dove (Caterina Ferioli), who is raised in an orphanage all the kids call the “grave”, and all she hopes for is to be adopted by a nice family. And when that day comes, she is adopted along-with Lionel (Alessandro Bedetti), the only person she doesn’t get along with at the orphanage. Some kids call him the “tearsmith”, a legend whose details are best left out, because you’ll hear about it enough in the film if you decide to give it a shot. Nica thinks Lionel is “very mysterious” bad boy, which is very strange, because the two literally grew up in the same orphanage, where everybody shares everything with each other. A ‘forbidden’ romance brews between the two, because they are supposed to be siblings in their new family setting, but are attracted to each other. Thrown in a romantic rival, some friends with their own personal troubles, and a very random climax which looks like it belong to a completely different movie, and you have “The Tearsmith”.
The dialogues in the film become gratingly cliched, outdated within 20 minutes of runtime, Nica talks like she is the heroine of a Victorian gothic novel in love with a fallen knight who might be a vampire. Just slight tweaks in the pompously pretentious inner-monologues of the principal protagonists’ and their exchanges, “The Tearsmith” could’ve been entertaining.
It feels a little unfair to write about the cast’s performance, they all deliver the one-dimensional roles like the script expects them to. The climax has very little to do with Nica and Lionel’s romance and the attention shifts towards the orphanage they grew up in and how children were raised in an abusive environment. The focus abruptly shifts from “forbidden romance” in the final minutes, a departure that feels disjointed given the lack of compelling buildup in the preceding events.
You should probably just skip this one. However, if you have a soft spot for the “bad boy” trope and liked “After We Collided” or “Through My Window”, you might like “The Tearsmith” too.
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