Bad Tales (2020)

The D'Innocenzo brothers open Bad Tales with a narrator who claims to have found a diary in the garbage, which makes the story true, or possibly not true, and this is the level of epistemological mischief on offer for the next two hours. In a suburb on the outskirts of Rome, terraced houses and tidy gardens conceal fathers who practice a quiet sadism, mothers who have been drained of all volition, and children who are building bombs in their bedrooms. The sun beats down. Nothing is well.

As a document of social consciousness, the film is a desert. The cast is white, Italian, and drawn from a narrow register of faces. There are no LGBTQ+ threads, no engagement with race, no environmental lament, no interest in body image or neurodiversity. Class animates the whole thing, the Rosas envy the Placidos for their children's grades while despising them as lower stock, but the film has no appetite for an economic thesis. It observes bourgeois rot and finds it simply rotten. The misery here is not a systemic critique awaiting a policy solution. It is a mood.

Where the film does carry a faint sermonizing hum is in its narration, which keeps apologizing for the sadness of what it is telling us and finally declares that it would prefer not to continue. That is a moral posture, a rebuke of adult corruption delivered from a slight elevation, and it lands with the weight of a shrug. The closing act of collective self-destruction arrives with the flatness of a formality. This is a film that wants to disturb and mostly manages to bore, which may be the cruelest thing a provocation can do.