THE STORY – 23-year-old Luca Varani moves through life in Rome without a clear sense of direction, balancing family, relationships, work, and a private side of himself he keeps largely hidden. A chance encounter eventually leads him toward a tragedy that will permanently alter the lives of everyone around him.
THE CAST – Emanuele Maria Di Stefano, Gaia Merlonghi, Simona Senzacqua, Roberta Mattei & Valerio Mastandrea
THE TEAM – Edoardo Gabbriellini (Director) & Damiano and Fabio D’Innocenzo (Writers)
THE RUNNING TIME – 104 Minutes
There is an immediately admirable idea at the center of Edoardo Gabbriellini’s “The City of the Living.” Rather than build a film around the notoriety of the 2016 murder of Luca Varani, Gabbriellini shifts attention toward the person whose life was cut short. Loosely adapted from Nicola Lagioia’s novel, the film is less interested in the mechanics of true crime than in reconstructing the everyday existence that came before it. That decision gives the film dignity and restraint, but also creates a frustrating contradiction: in trying so hard not to exploit Luca’s death, it never quite finds enough dramatic or thematic force of its own.
Emanuele Maria Di Stefano plays Luca as someone still hovering between dependence and adulthood. He has a girlfriend, a loving family, uncertain plans for the future, and the vague dissatisfaction of someone who feels he should already be further along in life. Gabbriellini is patient with these ordinary details, allowing Luca to be impulsive, affectionate, selfish, funny, and occasionally difficult without turning any one quality into an explanation for what later happens. Much of that approach succeeds because of Di Stefano’s remarkably unforced performance. Luca feels lived-in rather than written, while Gaia Merlonghi is equally convincing as Marta and Valerio Mastandrea brings quiet emotional weight to his father. The ensemble works in a lowkey, naturalistic register that suits Gabbriellini’s refusal to dramatize every interaction.
However, naturalism begins to resemble inertia. Luca moves from one environment to another without enough escalation, discovery, or transformation to sustain the film’s deliberately loose structure. Gabbriellini conceives the story as a coming-of-age abruptly interrupted rather than a puzzle leading toward an explanation for the crime. It is an interesting idea, but an absence of answers does not automatically create mystery or depth. Too often, observation substitutes for examination. Rome consequently never becomes as essential as the title promises. Its streets, nightlife, homes, and peripheral neighborhoods surround Luca, yet the city rarely develops into a meaningful force within his story. There is a potentially compelling connection between his uncertainty and a place offering seemingly endless possibilities without any clear direction, but that relationship remains more suggested than explored.
Similar caution surrounds Luca’s double life. Questions of money, identity, sexuality, desire, and insecurity emerge naturally from his experiences, only for the screenplay to pull away whenever they threaten to become more complicated. Refusing to judge Luca is crucial to what Gabbriellini is attempting, but understanding someone does not require explaining them away. Greater curiosity about these contradictions might actually have made him feel more fully realized. Keeping the perpetrators largely outside the narrative is another understandable choice. True crime has spent decades turning killers into objects of fascination while victims become secondary to their own deaths, and Gabbriellini clearly wants to reverse that relationship. Violence is similarly denied spectacle. Yet pushing the circumstances of Luca’s death so far to the margins has an unintended effect: what happens to him begins to feel like an abstract inevitability hanging over the film rather than the horrifying result of a specific collision of people and circumstances.
This narrowing is particularly noticeable when considering the scope of Lagioia’s source material, which extends Luca’s case into larger questions surrounding guilt, responsibility, inequality, sexuality, identity, and Rome itself. Gabbriellini has deliberately chosen something far more intimate, and there is nothing inherently wrong with that. But stripping away so much context also leaves fewer layers behind. What remains is respectful without always being particularly revealing. Visually, that understatement continues. Amine Messadi’s cinematography gives Luca’s world an appropriately unpolished naturalism, and individual images possess a quiet beauty, but the filmmaking rarely establishes a stronger visual identity beyond observation. Combined with the measured pacing, the middle section can feel more diffuse than contemplative.
Only after Luca disappears does the accumulation of everyday moments fully reveal its purpose. Suddenly, the routines that previously seemed almost inconsequential become reminders of everything that has been lost. Mastandrea is especially moving in these later scenes, communicating parental grief without excess, and Gabbriellini wisely continues to focus on absence rather than violence. It is here that the restraint finally produces the emotional effect the rest of the film has been reaching toward.
“The City of the Living” ultimately has a more compelling ethical approach than a dramatic one. Gabbriellini’s determination to restore Luca Varani’s humanity rather than reduce him to a crime victim is sincere and occasionally affecting, supported by strong performances and an effective final act. But the film becomes so defined by everything it refuses to do that what it wants to accomplish remains frustratingly elusive. There is considerable sensitivity in looking beyond the tragedy to the life that preceded it, but not enough depth or specificity to make that life resonate as powerfully as it should.
