29/02/2024 - BERLINALE 2024: The atmospheric series from the D’Innocenzo Brothers, following a disturbed cop on the trail of a serial killer, pushes the tropes of the detective drama to their darkest limits

Filippo Timi in Dostoyevsky

Since Boys Cry [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Damiano and Fabio D’Innocenzo
film profile] in 2018 and more recently with Bad Tales [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Fabio and Damiano D’Innocenzo
film profile] (2020) and America Latina [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] (2021), the Damiano and Fabio D’Innocenzo have been building a fascinating body of work: a metaphysical offshoot of the gritty, realistic-ish crime and mafia dramas that have become a staple of Italian commercial cinema since at least Gomorrah [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Domenico Procacci
interview: Jean Labadie
interview: Matteo Garrone
film profile] (2008). Their first series, Dostoyevsky [+see also:
interview: Fabio and Damiano D'Innocenzo
series profile] — which premiered at this year’s Berlinale and is more like a long film than anything truly episodic — continues their stylish and misanthropic journey towards the rotten heart of Italian society, but this time we find them playing with the well-established conventions and stereotypes of the detective drama. 

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We are first introduced to Enzo Vitello (Filippo Timi), a handsome though tired-looking man in his forties, as he is lying down in the middle of a drab living room, his feet in the foreground of an unsettling shot taken from the floor. Enzo is waiting for the handful of pills he’s swallowed to take effect and free him from what we will gradually learn is a world of pain. In conjunction with wide angle lenses, low and high angles are used to disturbing effect throughout the series, emphasising the discomfort felt by our main protagonist, who does not in fact manage to die: a phone call on his cellphone informs him that another victim has been found, and the suicidal detective must get back to work. We stay with Enzo for an agonisingly long time as he struggles to get up, clearly affected by the medicine he’s taken, and stumbles outside before puking his guts out.

It’s an opening so bleak that it is almost funny, and several times throughout this story of a broken man on the tail of an elusive serial killer, extremely dark and serious moments provoke a similar reaction. Although the series does at times espouse a visceral and realistic mode, and Timi’s performance grounds the project to a degree, most of these accents of gloom come across not as fully organic developments, but rather as attempts to play with and stretch the tropes of the detective drama. This palpable desire to shock the audience, to into even more disturbing territory than the grimmest of Nordic noirs or the similarly moody True Detective, sometimes comes at the expense of believability or tone. 

As far-fetched as they are, these elements are at least exciting and different. However Dostoyevsky — the nickname of the serial killer, who leaves long letters at each of his brutal crime scenes — is a lot less inspiring when it reproduces clichés without putting much of a spin on them. At the very end of the series, the tired trope of the detective driven mad by his obsession with a disturbed killer becomes something altogether different, original and deeply disturbing. But the character of Enzo’s daughter Ambra (the ethereal Carlotta Gamba), a drug addict harbouring very conflicted feelings about her distant father, is little more than an excuse for rather banal ideas around fatherhood. 

The father-daughter relationship also sets the stage for one of the show’s other bold experiments, namely scenes that appear partly improvised. Like the excesses of violence, these indicate a dedication to all things gritty and raw that feels rather juvenile, and much more banal than the show’s incredibly atmospheric visual style initially suggests. Like a cross between Thomas Vinterberg’s kinetic realism in Festen and Carlos Reygadas’ aesthetic of everyday poetry, the images by Matteo Cocco — shot on film — capture both the drabness and moving beauty of the Italian countryside, an empty no-man’s-land where everyone we meet seems to be in limbo, enduring what the serial killer describes as “this illness called life.” Like the protagonist from Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Enzo grapples with the question of whether murder can sometimes be justified, losing much of his sanity in the process.  

Despite its less convincing moments, the series succeeds in drawing us into its depths, its well-structured mystery and the enigma surrounding Enzo urging us to watch on, even if only through our fingers. But most beguiling of all is the show’s atmosphere, its depressive mood lodging itself in the mind like a sickness. This bold, 279 minutes-long experiment from the D’Innocenzo brothers isn’t entirely successful, but it is more than worth the plunge. 

Dostoyevsky was produced by Italy’s Sky Studios. International sales are handled by NBCUniversal. The series will be released in Italian cinemas in two parts later this year via Vision Distribution, before playing on Sky.  

Photogallery 19/02/2024: Berlinale 2024 - Dostoyevsky

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Filippo Timi, Gabriel Montesi, Carlotta Gamba, Damiano Fabio D'Innocenzo
© 2024 Dario Caruso for Cineuropa - dario-caruso.fr, @studio.photo.dar, Dario Caruso