On My Skin (2018)

The Italian judicial system has rarely received a more patient, unglamorous autopsy than the one Alessio Cremonini performs in On My Skin. Stefano Cucchi, a thirty-one-year-old building surveyor, is arrested over a few grams of narcotics and a seizure medication, and within a week he is dead in custody with a body his family can barely recognize in the morgue. The camera stays close, the corridors are fluorescent, and the film declines every opportunity to turn grief into spectacle. It is a reconstruction of documented events, and it behaves like one.

For those of us who spend our evenings cataloguing the cultural temperature of contemporary cinema, the picture is instructive mostly for what it declines to do. The cast is uniformly Italian and uniformly white. There is no romantic subplot of any orientation, no racial commentary layered onto a story that is entirely about the Italian state's treatment of its own citizens, no environmental subtext, and no economic thesis. The villain here is the carceral apparatus, not the market. Stefano's epilepsy is presented as a medical circumstance and a bureaucratic inconvenience, never as an identity to be celebrated. Jasmine Trinca's Ilaria is a formidable presence, but her campaign belongs to a family, not to a movement.

A message remains, delivered cleanly. The closing titles enumerate the dead, the acquittals, the later indictments, and the non-profit founded in Stefano's name, and the film makes no secret of where its sympathies lie. That is advocacy of a plain, old-fashioned sort, closer to a courthouse petition than to a sermon. It asks us to be angry at a specific set of men and a specific set of failures. A trace of the pulpit, then, and not a drop more.