Selected as Italy’s official contender for best international feature film at the 2026 Oscars, Francesco Costabile’s sophomore feature Familia carries the thematic preoccupations of their directorial debut Una Femmina: The Code of Silence, a crime drama loosely based on Italian journalist Lirio Abbate’s investigative book, which wrestles with women victims of domestic abuse in the context of a criminal organization. Competing in the Orizzonti section at last year’s Venice International Film Festival, Familia, in which Costabile shares writing credits with Vittorio Moroni and Andriano Chiarelli, functions as an adaptation of Luigi Celeste’s 2017 memoir Non sarà sempre così and tells the story of a working class family — the troubled Luigi (Francesco Gheghi), his brother Alessandro (Marco Cicalese), and their mother Licia (Barbara Ronchi) — forced to live in the shadow of the violent and criminal patriarch Franco (Francesco Di Leva).
If the feminine takes center stage in their debut’s examination of domestic violence and trauma, Costabile now explores masculinity in crisis and its toxic legacy. In early 2000s Rome, Franco is eager to reunite with his estranged family after almost a decade of incarceration for armed robbery. Worried of what might ensue after Franco’s reappearance, Licia files a restraining order against her husband and alters the locks on their house. Yet Franco finds a way to force himself in the family again and tries to win the affection of his teenage sons, which leaves Licia helpless. The authorities soon intervene, kicking Franco out of the house and separating the boys from their mother. So begins the further dissolution of an already dysfunctional family.
Hazy flashbacks, which open the film, display memories of loud arguments between the parents and of Franco terrorizing Licia. Costabile hardly details the abuse and instead interrogates what happens after the fact, and how trauma manifests in inexplicable ways. After the scene in which young Luigi — affectionately addressed as Gigi in the film — attempts to flee the police, we now follow his grown-up version, who finds kinship in a gang of neo-fascist skinheads who adore Mussolini. Gigi’s attachment to the far-right group is visibly a function of his rage and resentment towards his absentee father, who suddenly shows up after he himself ends up in jail for stabbing someone in a violent turf war. Following his release, Gigi, against the wishes of his brother and mother, feels the need to either reconnect with Franco or gauge his capacity for cruelty by understanding its roots, which may or may not result in another nightmare altogether. What’s more terrifying than a man who refuses to change his abusive ways?
Given its premise, Familia can easily register as a standard melodrama about domestic abuse and its toxic cyclicality, yet Costabile bends the genre by incorporating elements of psychological thriller and horror, aided capably by Giuseppe Maio’s somewhat eerie camerawork and Valerio Vigliar’s compellingly foreboding score, which allows for some intense, stunning dissection of the parallels between two men, who are equally capable of redemption and destruction, and the lives they erode along the way.
Though the movie at times winds up uneven, its emotional weight emerges from the brilliant performances at its center. Gheghi plays his role with a kind of rawness one could only ascribe to a man who’s very much aware of his volatile nature yet has no clue how to nurse it. In one of the film’s most striking moments, Gigi tells his girlfriend Giulia (Tecla Insolia), before serving time in prison, “I don’t want you to end up like my mom.” It’s a scene so small yet so pointedly effective in revealing the protagonist’s entire history and the film’s thematic core. Then there’s Di Leva smoothly shifting between a real paternal figure and a total stranger, between caring and outright imposing and frightening. Ronchi also delivers terrific work as a woman who tries her best to mend what seems to be beyond repair. In the end, Familia shows us the everyday tragedy of protecting the family unit, especially the ones sustained by a misguided notion of manhood.
Familia is now in theaters.
Learn more about the film at the IMDB site for the title.
You might also like…
