Dir: Edoardo Gabbriellini | Italy Drama 2026
There are crimes so senseless that trying to explain them can seem almost indecent. Edoardo Gabbriellini’s The City of the Living, freely inspired by Nicola Lagioia’s acclaimed true-crime book, wisely resists the conventional route into its shocking material.
This is not a forensic reconstruction, nor a crime thriller driven by the mechanics of violence. Instead, Gabbriellini looks backwards, towards the emotional and social terrain from which violence can emerge, and finds something far more unsettling: a generation struggling to discover what it means to be alive.
At the centre is Luca, 23, adopted into a loving family and caught between two worlds. He moves restlessly between the suburbs and Rome’s city centre, between his girlfriend and his friends, between the security of the life he has been given and an elusive second existence that he cannot quite articulate.
Gabbriellini observes him with an almost intimate tenderness. Luca is neither romanticised nor pathologised; he is simply young, uncertain and searching, carrying the strange weight of an age when everything can appear possible while simultaneously feeling irretrievably lost.
That ambiguity gives the film its distinctive tone. Rather than exploiting the notorious crime at its heart, Gabbriellini is interested in the circumstances, desires and dislocations surrounding it. Rome becomes less a picturesque backdrop than a psychological landscape: beautiful, restless and fractured, a city where privilege and marginalisation, intimacy and alienation exist uneasily alongside one another.
The film’s most striking quality is its refusal to provide easy answers. The violence that eventually shatters Luca’s trajectory is presented not as the inevitable consequence of a single motive, but as something frighteningly incomprehensible. Gabbriellini allows uncertainty to linger, creating a mood that is at once poetic and deeply disturbing.
There is a delicacy to the filmmaking that occasionally risks becoming too elliptical, but that restraint is also its greatest strength. By refusing to turn real suffering into spectacle, The City of the Living becomes less interested in the crime itself than in the fragile lives surrounding it. The result is an atmospheric, mournful portrait of youth, masculinity and emotional disconnection — and of a city in which lives can collide with devastating consequences.
A haunting and unexpectedly tender film that finds its power not in depicting violence, but in contemplating the emptiness from which it can emerge.
VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2026