Antonioni returned to "the landscape I remember from my childhood," the desolate vistas of the Po Valley, to film this study of a man who, deserted by his mistress, sets out with his little daughter in search of peace of mind and a new life. Il Grido seems closer to neorealism than to the studies of bourgeois experience Antonioni would create, starting with his next film, L'Avventura. But there are ways in which the protagonist and his landscape of indifference fit into a chain leading up to Red Desert (for one, his sad demise occurs against the backdrop of a demonstration against an American air base). Seymour Chatman, in his book Antonioni, or the Surface of the World, notes elements of Antonioni's style that first appear in Il Grido, among them, "...that the very unreadability of motive and feeling in a character's facial and bodily expression could itself become the sign of a certain important emotional climate...(and that) the plot develops no longer explicitly through major events but implicitly in silent interstices between minor events."