The Predators

Two families in Rome. The Pavone are bourgeois and intellectual: the father teaches philosophy at the university, the mother is a psychoanalyst, the son is restless. The Vismara are working class and fascist: they run a gun shop and have a portrait of Mussolini at home. The two families meet in a cemetery, and a small accident ties them together. Pietro Castellitto wrote, directed and acted in it; his first film. It screened in the Orizzonti section of the 77th Venice film festival and won the award for best screenplay. Castellitto took the David di Donatello for best debut director the following year. The target is not fascism but the bourgeoisie. Castellitto said so openly in interviews: the film is anti bourgeois, not anti fascist. The Vismara are strange but consistent; the Pavone do not even believe their own morality. The tone is deliberately unstable. Scenes move between comedy and violence without warning, and those transitions are the most argued over thing in it. The cast includes Massimo Popolizio, Manuela Mandracchia and Anita Caprioli. Fandango produced. Who it is for: viewers who follow contemporary Italian cinema and black comedy built on class. Who it is not for: the narrative does not run straight, there are too many characters, and the tone, which has sympathy for no one, can be tiring.