Dir: Francesco Sossai | Italy Comedy 2026
Francesco Sossai’s The Last One for the Road is the kind of film that drifts rather than drives. A shaggy, bittersweet comedy steeped in cheap wine, fading dreams and provincial nostalgia, it transforms the simple promise of “just one last drink” into an elegy for a disappearing Italy.
Premiering at this year’s Cannes’ Un Certain Regard, the film blends deadpan humour with gentle melancholy, creating an offbeat road movie that values mood over momentum.
The story follows Carlobianchi and Doriano, two hard-drinking fiftysomethings whose days are spent wandering from one bar to another across the Venetian plains, forever chasing one final glass before calling it a night. Their aimless routine is interrupted when they meet Giulio, a shy architecture student nursing his own uncertainties about love and the future. What begins as an accidental encounter evolves into a meandering journey through forgotten villages, roadside taverns and abandoned dreams, where the older men dispense dubious life lessons while Giulio gradually discovers a different way of looking at adulthood.
Sossai directs with remarkable patience, embracing narrative looseness rather than conventional dramatic structure. The screenplay often feels improvised, allowing conversations to breathe and awkward silences to become as meaningful as punchlines. While the episodic storytelling occasionally threatens to lose focus, the film’s emotional truth emerges through accumulation instead of plot twists. Beneath the drunken banter lies a quiet meditation on masculinity, aging and the slow erosion of local identity in an increasingly homogenized world.
Visually, the film is deceptively beautiful. Massimiliano Kuveiller’s cinematography captures Veneto not as a postcard destination but as a landscape suspended between memory and decline. Empty provincial roads stretch endlessly beneath soft summer skies, while faded taverns glow with warm amber light that recalls the comfort of places untouched by time.
Sossai lingers on modest details—a weathered bar counter, deserted gas stations, forgotten town squares—finding poetry in spaces that mainstream cinema usually overlooks. The relaxed visual rhythm mirrors the characters’ wandering existence, allowing viewers to sink into the film’s intoxicated tempo.
Pierpaolo Capovilla and Sergio Romano make Doriano and Carlobianchi feel like lifelong companions whose friendship has survived largely because neither has figured out how to move forward alone. Their comic timing is wonderfully understated, delivering absurd conversations with complete sincerity while revealing flashes of loneliness beneath the bravado. Filippo Scotti provides the perfect counterweight as Giulio. His restrained, observant performance gradually blossoms from awkward passivity into quiet confidence, making him both audience surrogate and emotional anchor.
The chemistry among the trio is effortless, generating humor that never feels manufactured. Rather than relying on broad gags, Sossai finds comedy in repetition, hesitation and the melancholy absurdity of men convincing themselves that every drink really will be the last.
If The Last One for the Road has a weakness, it is its deliberate refusal to build dramatic urgency. If you’re expecting a tightly-structured road movie you may find its leisurely pacing frustrating, and some narrative threads fade away as casually as conversations at closing time. Yet that very shapelessness is also the film’s philosophy: life rarely offers neat conclusions, only another road, another conversation and perhaps another drink.
Warm, wistful and quietly funny, The Last One for the Road is less interested in arriving somewhere than in savouring the journey and the company along the way. Sossai has crafted an affectionate portrait of lost souls refusing to surrender to modern life, proving that sometimes the most memorable journeys are those that never seem to end.
IN UK CINEMAS FROM 10 July 2026