“In real life, immersion in the developer is followed by a wash,” we are told. There is something ominous and seductive about the red-bathed worktop and the papers, plucked out and laid beneath the plate, laved in sloshing fluid, and held aloft, as the image blots into view. “It’s always a thrill to develop a photo,” Giulia says, and, true enough, over the game’s five or so hours, I never tired of the process. These are to be developed in the family darkroom. Giulia’s hunt to find her sister’s killer is keyed to tactile objects: a rotary telephone, with numbers pencilled onto a pad beside it a deck of tarot cards, for the daily forecast of her fate and, best of all, film-that silken record of life, as frail and flammable as memory, curled into canisters and tucked into her bag.
The pleasures of Martha is Dead lie in its smellable vividness, and in the mystery-spiked languor of its early hours.
Outside, there are lemon trees and ploughed fields, and credit must go to the developer, LKA, which is based in Chiantishire, near Florence, for supplying us with a zesty chronicle of home soil. We are free to snap whatever we like, and there is much to lure our eye. It’s a handsome object: a dark chunk of metal and glass, brickish of bulk and shape, with a flip-up viewfinder that Giulia peers down into like a scryer. Giulia is a keen amateur photographer, in possession of a 1940 Rolleicord II, type 4, loaded with 120mm. Giulia’s father is a German general, and her house is lapped in middle-class comfort the pantry is stocked with fruit and vegetables, despite the rationing that reaves the country, and the hallways are nourished with art-Doré on the walls, Franz Lehár wafting from a wooden radio.
I came away from Martha is Dead in a state of blurry bathos, which is doubly a shame when you consider the fine-grained clarity in which its opening hours are drawn. Giulia, however, is quick to shoot down the notion that her sister’s death was a symptom of national strife “Martha was not killed by politics or war! She was killed by something much closer and much less clear,” she says. The year is 1944, and the place is occupied Italy-specifically, the Tuscan town of Romola, in whose forests dwell members of the Italian resistance movement. Just then, three fighter planes hurtle, in formation, overhead, and thus the game’s prevailing themes are set: denial, doubleness, and the coupling of bodies with besieged lands. The scene has a surreal tone: the pre-dawn light matches Martha’s blued skin, and a thick fog clings to the shore, damp and dirty, like the dress that hangs off her limp form. Giulia has just retrieved Martha’s body from a lake, hauling her ashore as though she had caught a mermaid. Sadly, evidence is mounting to the contrary. Martha is Dead opens with a refutation: “Martha is not dead.” Such are the words of Martha’s identical twin sister, Giulia, as whom we play.
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