LIKE ANY DEVOTEE of vintage – some might claim outmoded – psychologically driven suspense film tactics, Italian director Matteo Garrone is fond of foreshadowing. Proof arrives at the very beginning of Garrone's Embalmer, when pint-size 50-year-old Peppino (Ernesto Mahieux) first spies statuesque young Valerio (Valerio Foglia Manzillo) at a zoo near Naples. The duo's initial conversation is conducted in front of a cage containing an African maroubu; cinematographer Marco Onorato even adopts a blurred and blinkered vulture's-eye view as the scene insinuates that Peppino and the flesh-eating bird have something in common. Soon enough the stench of animals mingles with the stench of death: promising big money, Peppino takes Valerio under his wing and schools him in taxidermy, an activity that boasts Norman Bates as its chief movieland practitioner.

For Bates, taxidermy was a "hobby"; for Peppino, it's a profession. Still, Peppino's hardly an ideal spokesmodel. In addition to stuffing and preserving shrews and bulls, he moonlights as a Mafia underling, sewing and unsewing de-coffin-ated corpses so they can double as drug containers. He keeps this little secret from Valerio while dangling the resulting financial rewards before the impressionable younger man; in fact, Valerio's first paycheck comes paired with an uncommon bonus: a ring. Additional job perks include evenings spent "mixing it up" with ladies of the night, an activity that allows Peppino to act out the playboy role already broadcast by his hideously loud '70s leisurewear – all the while covertly ogling the true object of his adoration.

Valerio has a beautiful person's habit of vanishing the moment a needy worshipper becomes aggressive, and Peppino gets this treatment during a mob-ordered trip to Cremona: while the little man digs plastic coke baggies out of dead bodies, the big one unzips his pants so a rebellious girl named Deborah (Elisabetta Roccheti) can test out her surgically enhanced lips. A faux-friendly trio briefly forms, but Deborah ruthlessly if playfully taps into the undercurrents of the men's bond, dressing them up in her lacy nightwear and makeup. During one golf course day trip, her teasing turns nasty and Garrone's direction makes its most effective subtle shift: the bleakness of the scene's (and most of the film's) near-abandoned vacation setting gives way to expanses of pure sky behind the two desperate contestants battling for Valerio's affection.

The Embalmer's tabloid-inspired tale is gothically overstated, and Garrone certainly sprinkles the film with verbal clues about how the story – and Peppino and Valerio's relationship – will end. Little Peppino carries, rather than shirks, heavy Rumpelstiltskin connotations: he's exactly the malevolent, short-statured archetype, or stereotype, that Tom McCarthy's upcoming Station Agent aims to counter. Yet Garrone's film is more ambiguous than it sounds, particularly in its cryptic portrayal of the men's connection. The main quality they have in common isn't shown, and only Peppino hints at it.

The Embalmer's odd characters represent facets of personality; some writers have likened the movie's ruthlessly skewed power dynamics to Fassbinder's films, but Garrone's chosen genre aligns him with a different master. Both Peppino's career vocation and one gloomy night-into-day shot of an automobile slowly sinking into dark waters overtly cite Psycho, and unlike many post-Hitchcock stylists, Garrone shares that director's interest in the perversities that flower from romance. He and Onorato also owe a debt to Antonioni's views of chilly modernity (a quick glimpse of Deborah working on a mannequin's hairdo at a beauty parlor) and environmental alienation (the film's climax kicks off when one character journeys through a deep fog in order to see, and attempt to reach, another). Garrone presents an Italy where marble architecture is squandered on auto shop lobbies. Drained of color aside from shades of gray, the beaches seem ashy, not sandy.