There's a fine line between "ambiguous" and "vague"–too often, something meant to be teasingly suggestive and mysterious falls all the way out of focus, losing its artistic clarity, insight, and purpose. After an intriguing set-up, Italian director Matteo Garrone's noir melodrama The Embalmer drifts inexorably toward the wrong side of the line, squandering a premise loaded with disturbing sexual undercurrents and seemingly endless macabre possibilities. At least some of the confusion arises from traditional Italian attitudes toward homosexuality, which Garrone propagates more often than he critiques, obscuring the story's erotic tensions in a maddeningly coy and sinister shroud. The film's ability to hold together at all is a tribute to Ernesto Mahieux's compelling turn as the titular antihero, a diminutive taxidermist whose secret lust for a strapping Adonis half his age hints at a psyche that's simultaneously wounded and diabolical. When the middle-aged Mahieux spots twentysomething waiter Valerio Foglia Manzillo at the zoo, he regales the younger man with anecdotes about taxidermy, invites him to his workshop, and offers him an apprentice job at a conspicuously inflated salary. Eager to leave the restaurant business, Manzillo accepts, and the two work harmoniously together, though Mahieux neglects to mention his side business handling bodies for the local mafia. In the downtime, the gregarious dwarf arranges for prostitutes to join them in nightclub excursions and group sex, but his attentions are clearly turned toward his oblivious protégé. Their tenuous arrangement reaches the breaking point when Manzillo's girlfriend, Elisabetta Rocchetti, enters the picture and immediately picks up on Mahieux's sexual jealousy and resentment. With all these tensions on the rise, not to mention an occupation that involves stuffing and mounting dead carcasses, The Embalmer seems primed for a nasty Grand Guignol climax, but it takes a small eternity for the other shoe to drop. Once it does, Garrone closes with a head-scratching denouement that makes little sense literally or metaphorically, and calls into question how taxidermy figures into this story in the first place. Though the script ultimately reduces his complex character into a sniveling villain, Mahieux dominates his stilted co-stars with a slippery charisma that twists his seeming generosity into acts of supreme manipulation, as if cunning alone could seduce Manzillo into surrendering his sexuality. Both the actor and the character deserve a better movie, one that might have channeled the latter's desires into more than just a few rote genre thrills.