Matteo Garrone Dogman Drama • 2018 • 1h 42m

Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the superman.

Marcello seems to embody this Nietzschean prologue.

He knows how to tame the rottweiler beast and groom it, as well as tame the beastly man by providing him with cocaine.

Marcello is a small superman; he knows what it means to love, have friends, painstakingly build an image, and knows how to work and manage.

A passion for dogs and unconditional love for his daughter define his world.

He dines with neighboring slot machine and pawn shop traders at the Bolina trattoria while his daughter hugs him, covering his eyes.

Marcello always smiles, often says "love" and "good job" because these are the words he would love to hear.

He shares his plate of pasta with the dog and thinks he can control Simone, a desperate and obtuse cocaine addict who disturbs the peace of a place that exists only for the sake of existing.

He gets involved in robberies, nights with thong-clad angels, while he rides home on his scooter with the wounded, unconscious beastly man.

Simone breathes in cocaine while others discuss how to get rid of him, but no one finds a solution.

Marcello listens, endures, loves, plays, works, dives with his daughter in the depths of the sea, compromises but does not accept Simone's proposal.

Marcello lives and survives in his own way; he knows where he can push and where he must stop, although there is always that rope stretched between the beast, the beasts, the man, and the superman.

Marcello has his own ethics; he knows the limit, knows the law, and will have a close encounter with it.

The outcome will overwhelm his existential structure; duty will take precedence over his neighbors, to whom he must prove he is not what they think.

The rope will lead him to the side of the beast that must return the bone to the master after it is thrown, distancing him from the other side of the rope.

The leash of the need for recognition will become the collar tightened around his neck by others' indifference, loneliness, idiocy, and the inevitability of revenge.

Marcello is a small "old boy" who gently revives a tiny dog found in the freezer, who looks confused at friends playing soccer, who endures Simone's massacre after smashing his scooter, and who performs a sacrificial revenge in the name of everyone.

"Let him who is without sin cast the first stone," Garrone seems to shout, telling his personal story of the canaro of the Magliana.

Those who are not without sin should have pity, compassion, forgiveness, horror, and pain.

Those who are not without sin should feel and see that disfigured face, should experience the torment of confused, lifeless, exhausted, powerless, depleted despair.

Those who are not without sin should feel like man and beast, love and hate, eros and thanatos.

The greatness of man is to be a bridge and not an end: in man, one can love that he is a transition and a sunset. I love those who do not know how to live except by fading, for they are a transition.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

The epilogue of a film that tattoos itself on the skin and penetrates intrusively and painfully into the flesh, digging into the abyss of the impossibility of being between beastly idiocy and foolish humanity.