Boarding school in the mountains.

Giulio made a big mistake... He called the school from his mother's phone, saying there was a bomb: quickly traced, he was sent to boarding school.

The boy doesn't understand the educational system but will meet Edoardo, who describes himself as "a bad investment for his father."

Coming from Berlin and sent there after escaping from various institutions, Edoardo knows well those environments where, rather than educating, they prepare you to suddenly fire hundreds of employees.

The boarding school is a sort of Shining-like building where difficult boys are "re-educated" to raise the country's future ruling class.

They are children of very wealthy families who "love to pack suitcases with kids included."

A sort of recovery community for spoiled kids, a Big Brother of training.

Everything is controlled, and the "educators" know and pretend not to know everything that happens at night, including clandestine outings: hazing and bullying are part of the program.

"Repressed tolerance" in a regime of controlled freedom.

They play ice hockey and frequent the forest brothel while "the families know that whatever happens will be resolved on the spot." Wealth does not hesitate to delegate even the education of children: what matters is the profit rate, and only that is the basis of one's own and others' alienation.

Giulio meets Elena at the brothel, and she becomes a regular acquaintance.

In the boarding school, there is an abandoned floor that hides a secret, but perhaps this too is part of the program... nothing seems left to chance.

More than spying on the boys, they learn to know them, declares the educator, while someone sings with a gun in hand "living... without melancholy... living.... without regrets..." "living as long as there's youth."

A youth rich only in money, alone and abandoned by parents who do not want to be named.

Loneliness, lack of attention, are the basis of cynical behaviors that want to challenge authority where it is absent in the family.

Convincing faces accompany the entry into the dehumanizing professional gym of these wealthy victims; freshmen in an overwhelming economic-capitalistic game.

The message of this dark, at times horror, tale is decidedly interesting and points the finger at families, wealth, and the training in cynicism of the new ruling classes.

A real political subtext, tense, sharp, violent: a story of "deformation" rather than formation that unfortunately yields to understandable cinematic naiveties for an interesting but at times confusing debut.

The autobiographical element is evident, accompanied by strong, more or less provocative cinematic references; there are no good feelings or judgmental concessions.

The film highlights the virtuosity of the double perspective on reality that the director's philosophy degree exercises: perhaps, looking at the film again after some time, the analytical mechanism will allow him to refine his artistic/narrative abilities, weaning them from forgivable but irreconcilable naiveties with this type of conceptual ambitions.

23-Jun-2023 by Beatrice