IFF21 The Predators

Synopsis

Winner of Best New Director at the 2021 David di Donatello Awards, actor/director Pietro Castellitto delivers an entertaining black comedy which sees two families from opposing social backgrounds collide.

The Pavone and Vismara families are complete opposites. One bourgeois and intellectual, while the other proletarian and Fascist, these apparently contrary family units share the same jungle: Rome. A trivial accident brings the two together and the madness of a 25-year-old will set them on a collision course, revealing that everyone has a secret, no one is what they seem - and we are all predators.

Buoyed by an inspired ensemble cast and featuring a vast network of characters, including an assistant professor obsessed with the mystery of Nietzsche’s virginity (Castellitto); his father, a philandering doctor (Massimo Popolizio); his filmmaker mother (Manuela Mandracchia); a brash gun-shop clerk (Giorgio Montanini) and many others, The Predators goes to absurd lengths to reveal harsh, hilarious truths about class structure in contemporary Italy.