Daniele Luchetti Confidenza Thriller • 2024 • 2h 16m

He who lets one hand be put in his pocket today will find two hands emptying it tomorrow.

Peter is a literature professor who "leaves his mark."

He explains fear by contrasting it with love, which his favorite student Teresa Quadraro calls overwhelming.

He leads his students to graduation, many of them return to see him while she, the most promising, brilliant in math and physics is lost: she is a waitress in a tavern and also has an affair with the boss who is married with children.

Peter drops by to see her and wants to understand why: from that evening an affair is born between them and Teresa goes to live with him, in a house overrun with books everywhere. An overwhelming passion involves them to the point where Quadraro proposes that they reveal to each other a secret never told to anyone to make their love unbreakable.

Although Peter has the perception that he is wrong, he lets go of that confession and an obstacle course of fears, obsessions, persecutory dreams, paranoia, desires and horrors begins for him.

Teresa disappears for a year and a half, but then returns and will do so repeatedly almost as if she wants to continue practicing that exercised torment that she needs to refresh each time, as he continuously exposes himself to her secret spectrum.

Peter will begin to have success in his work, through writing books and disseminating them through the intermediary of the publishing house and the Ministry of Education: his subject matter is mainly about the pedagogy of affection.

He marries the mathematics and physics professor at his institution, also in a college career, interrupted: they will have a rather neglected, misunderstood and never actually loved daughter, while they embark on an imprudent friendship/business relationship with an unresolved couple.

Based on Domenico Starnone's novel of the same name, the story proceeds by highlighting the anthropological fragility of a man unable to esteem himself, to shield himself in the face of extreme demands: what he knows he is does not correspond to what he appears to be. His image is split, fragile, exposed to the unmasking that looms daily.

He is an average, ordinary, small man and could have been so undisturbed; after all, mediocrity is a right!

But when something horrible is revealed, while never knowing what, it exposes him to the judgment of others and eventual public revelation: mistrust, resentment, torment, self-exposure to a persecutory iter more psychological than real takes over.

Teresa and Peter are orphans: the loneliness and freedom that this condition entails leads them to entrap each other even though she claims to be accountable to no one: she becomes a distinguished university professor of mathematics and physics in the US.

Her career will not stop her from making inroads into her former prof's life as if to exert the power she has cleverly engineered over him.

Is that secret too much for her to continue to have an equal relationship, or is her goal of claiming an indissolubility nothing more than a thoughtfulness to manipulate, subdue, and manage a man she perceived to be little?

Rather, the need seems to be to downsize that bourgeois, so beloved and unknown to most as if it were a laboratory animal to observe with the scientific/mathematical eye what outcomes it might have: the terror of the risk of unraveling the reality of a seemingly "upright" life is always lurking.

Nothing is known about the biography of the two, except that they are both orphans; nothing is known about the secrets mutually revealed: however, it seems undeniable that Teresa's psychopathology does not hesitate to subject him to her control and to exert a wearisome power over Peter's life: she wants to expose him to himself, to his gullibility in the knowledge that she cannot succeed except by subjecting him to a distant but ever-present, constant, unceasing torment.

Thom Yorke's unmistakable music accompanies the trial of her intentions and reiterates the trial of his secrets: the cat-and-mouse game is the constant and overpowering wins out over love and fear.

Violence, overpowering and ugliness always have an army of miscreants in their service