Gianluca Minucci Europa Centrale Thriller • 2024 • 1h 27m

The story is set in 1940s Europe, during a train journey featuring two individuals linked to an international organization, the Comintern. The goal of their journey is to complete a highly significant secret mission: delivering the letters of Spartacus.

In this setting, among those singing “Giovinezza” and those pretending to join the celebration, the narrative takes on dark and suffocating tones, with the ideologies of the time weighing heavily on the protagonists' lives. The political and social landscape, overshadowed by oppressive governments and violent conflicts, becomes the backdrop for the gradual erosion of the characters’ humanity, as they find themselves trapped in a spiral of suspicion, fear, and manipulation. In this atmosphere of deceit and espionage, the mission takes on a dimension beyond its original objective, becoming a journey into the depths of the psyche and the moral crisis of the era.

"A comedy of hell," as described by Tommaso Ragno, one of the main actors, "of beings who prefer to dwell in hell, in the lowliest depths, because it’s from the filth that the future emerges, from the basest substance that the best things are born... we are not made for the paradisiacal."

It’s a film about the most irrational aspects of humanity, about Cassola’s mission and his espionage operation, realizing that it's not enough to know what to do—there is always the violence of the unpredictable lurking. A cast of actors plays characters unafraid of being disgusting or treading the line of the ridiculous.

The director, a professor of history and literature, compares directing to teaching, suggesting it has shown him how to proceed, not just in dramaturgy. Totalitarianisms and political faiths lie at the foundation of a psychotic, hallucinatory, disorienting, and disturbing film. A movie about the individual, about the existence of a raw, unpolished human being, beyond the algorithmic, with eternal archetypes, where characters do not possess a defined identity—they are not one without being no one, because what they intend to be, or suppose themselves to be, is indeterminable due to their inherent precariousness, unreliability, and wretchedness.

A hypnotically tragic film, brimming with physical and psychological violence: sadistically disgusting, especially in its portrayal of toxic masculinity and the blind devotion to respective ideologies. A film that aims to be provocative, succeeding in tracing the refined paths of those who wish to capture the metaphysical dimensions, through the exploration of power struggles, betrayal, and obsession.