The Big Dreamer: the cinema of David Lynch retrospective continues successfully at Giunti Odeon, with the third appointment dedicated to one of the great American director's best-loved films: The Elephant Man. London, second half of the 19th century. Due to a very rare disease, neurofibromatosis, which has given him a monstrous appearance, young John Merrick is exposed as an ‘elephant man’ in the slum of Bytes, an alcoholic who lives off his monstrosity and treats him like a beast. It is here that Merrick is discovered by Dr Frederick Treves, a surgeon at the London Hospital, who convinces Bytes to give him up for a while so that he can study and treat him. Taken to the hospital and presented to a congress of scientists, John soon reveals himself in Treves' eyes as a man of superior intelligence and a refined and sensitive soul. An epochal film, which changed the rules of horror, reversing the dynamics between ‘monster’ and spectator: who is afraid of whom? No less ancestral and traumatic than Eraserhead, hybrid and tragicomic like its protagonist, on the one hand it drags the general public to tears and on the other it throws up splinters of horror and Tod Browning's memories. The restoration enhances the black and white of the great Freddie Francis, giving new strength to this highly topical reflection on the gaze and horror, staged by one of the most visionary directors in the history of cinema.