Sub­ur­ra

Reheat­ed gang­ster shenani­gans in which we see lots of awful peo­ple being awful, Ste­fano Sollima’s Sub­ur­ra strains very hard to offer a new twist on mate­r­i­al that’s as old as mama’s ragu recipe. He main­ly does this by throw­ing on the dreamy M83 track ​‘Out­ro’ dur­ing the film’s qui­et, reflec­tive moments as a way to impose a sense of dreamy bom­bast. It’s an exam­ple of crass design­er pes­simism, where every­thing that can go wrong does so, and every­thing is shown as being rel­a­tive to a forth­com­ing ​“apoc­a­lypse”.

A crooked politi­cian acci­den­tal­ly kills a pros­ti­tute dur­ing a drug orgy, but is only inter­est­ed in dis­pos­ing of the corpse and retain­ing his pro­fes­sion­al dig­ni­ty. When pet­ty hoods start brib­ing him, he insti­gates a tit-for-tat gang war, the big side-pot being the chance to turn the sleepy sea­side port of Ostia into Italy’s answer to Las Vegas.

Props to Sol­li­ma for being able to jug­gle so many char­ac­ters (plot-wise this is just the tip of the ice­berg), but it does mean that stereo­types are leaned on heav­i­ly and often. There’s the tart with a heart, the weedy busi­ness­man, the psy­chot­ic hood, plus the Gyp­sy fam­i­ly who are wor­ry­ing­ly paint­ed as cor­pu­lent, taste­less and vio­lent fools. At the cen­tre of it all is Clau­dio Amendola’s age­ing mob­ster known as Samu­rai, whose old guard sta­tus affords him a grudg­ing respect from his trig­ger-hap­py peers.

And yet, the film has no real cen­tre, shift­ing back and forth between dis­parate plot strands and offers the view­er no-one who we real­ly wouldn’t like to see whacked out at the near­est con­ve­nience. The direc­tor earned his spurs in tele­vi­sion, spin­ning off Mat­teo Garrone’s Cannes-laud­ed Gomor­rah for the small screen, and if you didn’t know that fact, you could’ve prob­a­bly detect­ed it from watch­ing Sub­ur­ra – it’s all sur­face sheen and pre­cious lit­tle depth.