A like-minded colleague of mine recently alerted me to this Italian short of some years back. Actually, the film's plot - a pregnant woman suffering a traffic accident was later the launching pad for the disturbingly ultraviolent French chiller INSIDE (2007) - and structure - a fatal car crash leading to a dream sequence was the whole point of Claude Chabrol's underrated ALICE OR THE LAST ESCAPADE (1977) - is not all that original. What I found to be most effective, however, is the fact that the incident that was the catalyst for the accident in the first place (a girl slipping in a coma at the hospital where the protagonists work) turns out, ironically, to have been a false alarm after all!
Besides, the dream sequence ingeniously builds up the tension so that one was unsure whether the sinister stranger who gave them a lift on the road to nowhere was going to turn out a vampire or one of those crazed patriarchs in the tradition of Tobe Hooper's THE Texas CHAIN SAW MASSACRE (1974)! Indeed, the dream's own twist - the man locking himself up with the 'undead' Samaritan as he lets the wife and an 'imprisoned' little girl escape (perhaps a foretaste of the aforementioned girl's eventual recovery?) - beautifully leads into the end revelation of the husband and the motorcyclist (whose curious disappearance at the start should have alerted one to the fact that things are not quite what they seem) having died in the crash and the wife and her unborn child being taken to the safety of an awaiting ambulance. Incidentally, the relationship between the central couple was also convincingly dwelt upon via their spirited exchanges at the start of the film. Checking out the hitherto unknown young film-maker's resume' on IMDb, I realize that this is his second of four films, only the last of which was a feature, albeit shot-for-TV.
Besides, the dream sequence ingeniously builds up the tension so that one was unsure whether the sinister stranger who gave them a lift on the road to nowhere was going to turn out a vampire or one of those crazed patriarchs in the tradition of Tobe Hooper's THE Texas CHAIN SAW MASSACRE (1974)! Indeed, the dream's own twist - the man locking himself up with the 'undead' Samaritan as he lets the wife and an 'imprisoned' little girl escape (perhaps a foretaste of the aforementioned girl's eventual recovery?) - beautifully leads into the end revelation of the husband and the motorcyclist (whose curious disappearance at the start should have alerted one to the fact that things are not quite what they seem) having died in the crash and the wife and her unborn child being taken to the safety of an awaiting ambulance. Incidentally, the relationship between the central couple was also convincingly dwelt upon via their spirited exchanges at the start of the film. Checking out the hitherto unknown young film-maker's resume' on IMDb, I realize that this is his second of four films, only the last of which was a feature, albeit shot-for-TV.