Parenting & Family Quote by Beatrice Dalle

Dalle isn’t selling a ghost story so much as admitting that a location can direct a performance as aggressively as a script. The “strange atmosphere” comes from a concrete social reality: a big house repurposed for “troubled children,” a phrase that already carries institutional euphemism and quiet indictment. Then she punctures any romantic aura with blunt evidence of damage: “walls had been burnt down.” It’s not metaphorical fire; it’s aftermath. The set isn’t just “weathered” or “lived-in,” it’s scarred.

Her most revealing move is grammatical. The walls “had been” burned down, a passive construction that makes the destruction feel both inevitable and unclaimed. Who did it? Kids, staff, neglect, the system itself? The ambiguity is the point: the building becomes a repository for unassigned violence, the kind that follows places where society stores its problems out of sight. When she says the building was “charged with this history,” she borrows the language of electricity and trauma at once. Charged implies latent power, a current you can’t see but can feel in the body.

The intent is to validate how mood gets made: not by method acting theatrics, but by proximity to real pain. Dalle frames the shoot as a kind of contamination. The history “stayed with us,” suggesting the cast didn’t simply depict darkness; they inhaled it. In an industry that often fetishizes authenticity, she’s naming the cost: some locations don’t just host a film, they haunt the people making it.