Roberto Succo

A young man in the south of France presents himself as a sales rep and says he is English, though the accent is Italian. One day his name is Kurt, the next it is André. He starts a relationship with Léa, who is sixteen, and in the same stretch of months he is committing armed robberies, stealing cars, abducting people. The police work on killings they cannot connect and have no idea who the man is. What Léa eventually tells them changes everything. Roberto Succo was real. At nineteen he killed his parents in Italy, and after escaping from a psychiatric hospital he committed a series of murders in France and Italy in the late eighties; he was caught in 1988 and died in prison the same year. Cédric Kahn builds the film not as a police procedural but around how the man lived inside his own lies, offering no explanation and no diagnosis. Stefano Cassetti was not a professional actor, which is part of why the performance is unsettling.