Francesco Costabile’s Familia is many genres rolled into one—thriller, horror, family drama—but, most of all, it’s a slice of unyielding toxicity. The filmmaker is emphatic and explicit in putting the noxiousness underlying relationships under the scanner, making the film an understandably uneasy watch. After having opened in Venice last year Familia has been picked as Italy’s official entry for the 2026 Oscars in the Best International Feature Film category.
Based on Luigi Celeste’s memoir Non sarà sempre così (It won’t be like this forever), about embracing fascism in the days of his youth, the film has Francesco Gheghi playing Celeste aka Gigi.
Gigi and his brother Alessandro (Marco Cicalese) live in Rome with their mother Licia (Barbara Ronchi) after her separation from their violent father Franco (Francesco Di Leva). But their already distressed, indigent world keeps getting more precarious as Franco habitually crash-lands, despite changed addresses, neighbourhoods and locks to the main door.
Costabile dives deep into the mind of Gigi and also does a psychological examination of the dysfunctional family—the parents in particular. On the one hand, there’s no let-up in Franco’s excesses, on the other there’s the misplaced trust of Licia and Gigi in assuming that he has mended his ways. “Don’t make me regret,” she says, of giving him space in their lives again. Which is exactly what he does. He e manipulates them emotionally, plays mind games to insinuate himself back in the fold, telling them how much he has changed, how deeply loves and needs them and enjoys spending time with them, asking for forgiveness and fresh start but going back to his old ways. They get taken in by him and allow themselves to be victimised and tormented. Love and loyalty and brutality and trauma go hand in hand.
While Licia works tirelessly to support her sons, forgetting her own needs and desires in the process, the resultant anger, anxiety and the inability to understand and process his feelings for his father drive Gigi to the gang of skinheads. Only Alessandro is sorted enough to realise that redemption is easier wished for than achieved and that it is ridiculous to pretend normalcy. “Can’t you remember how dad used to beat mom?” he asks Gigi who appears to have conveniently erased it from memory perhaps as mode to protect his own sanity.
Gigi’s and the larger family’s journeys take a predictable course to hell. As Licia says of Franco, “We’ll never be free of him”. Though the film ends on a sad note, thankfully, Celeste, for real, did manage to get another shot at life after hitting rock bottom, as the end credits inform us.
Costabile crafts a fine film with characters and relationships that have depth and complexity. They are tied by fate but widely different in their responses to it. The ugliness of the situation is concurrent with the vulnerability and misfortune. Added to that his tight control of the narrative that keeps his audience hooked.
A suitably restless Gheghi, wise Cicalese, weary Ronchi and diabolical Di Leva power the family with their impeccable performances in a manner that makes them seem like a real family. Luca Servino’s set design and Erika Aversa’s set décor build a sense of suffocation and Guiseppe Maio’s camera adds to it the mood of intense and lingering dread. The frames often feel like a nightmare or hallucination themselves underlined with Valerio Vigliar’s sombre and ominous original score.
But the technical aspects apart, the film reaches out eventually for how it foregrounds pernicious parenting and how it can scar young lives forever. It’s about the generational legacy of violence and guilt and the bequeathing of fear that sires further fear.
