13/11/2024 - Italian director Gianluca Santoni debuts with an endearing first feature skilfully mixing softness and harshness by approaching the topic of domestic violence from an original angle

“I have to save someone I love. –From whom? –From a bad man.” When a small 10-year-old boy makes this kind of statement, his naivety can of course make you smile, but it could also be a reason to seriously worry. It is between these two moods of comedy and drama and on the line of a surprising buddy movie that skilfully navigates My Killer Buddy [+see also:
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“You have three marks on your face and your wrist is broken. –I fell. –You should throw away that bath mat, it could also be dangerous for your son.” In the emergencies, no one is fooled about the origins of Maria’s wounds (Barbara Ronchi), especially her young son Denni (Francesco Lombardo) who knows exactly what his father (Andrea Sartoretti) is capable of and dreams of making him pay for the violence he regularly inflicts upon his mother. But what can you do to fix these adult problems when you’re only 10 in a small town on the Adriatic coast? The introverted Denni feels all the more painfully powerless as his mother accepts to endure (“Daddy would be sad if we left him. He loves you.”). But an idea emerges when a little girl from the neighbourhood randomly reveals that her cousin is a “super killer”. Denni then steals €500 in his father’s warehouse’s safe and offers a contract to Secco (Andrea Lattanzi, already appreciated in Manuel [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile]), a young idle thug from the neighbourhood, in reality very far from having the murderer profile that Denni imagined, yet nevertheless very interested in the prospect of making some cash. Between the kind fake killer pretending to play along and the kid who commissioned him, at once hyper-determined and relatively naive (but not completely either), a surprising business relationship and a nascent friendship begin (“you must learn to float if you don’t know how to swim”) with very high stakes…

Evolving on the border between the bitter social realism of his topic and the romantic tale full of tenderness of its “buddy movie” vehicle, the film finds a beautiful accuracy and a very good equilibrium between several genres. Denni and Secco’s misadventures (with both characters played perfectly) are often funny without the plot (with a script written by the director together with Michela Straniero) ever losing neither its present (domestic violence) nor its potential (murder) dramatic essence, in an atmosphere of winter greyness enveloped by Serbian director of photography Damjan Radonovic. The whole makes for an at once simple and very skilfully controlled debut feature, making Gianluca Santoni a filmmaker whose next opus we will await with curiosity.

My Killer Buddy was produced by Italian outfit Nightswim and co-produced by their compatriots at Sajama Films and RAI Cinema, as well as Croatian company Antitalent. The film is sold by Minerva Pictures International in collaboration with TVCO.

(Translated from French)