04/09/2025 - VENICE 2025: Gianluca Matarrese continues to demonstrate his mastery of the conversation-centric documentary, turning his camera on his own family

Maria Luisa Magno in I Want Her Dead

“Where blood ends, peace begins / where peace ends, blood begins…” goes the chant-like score accompaniment by Cantautoma to the newest effort by Italian documentarian Gianluca Matarrese, I Want Her Dead [+see also:
trailer
interview: Gianluca Matarrese
film profile]. Its original Italian title, Il quieto vivere (lit. “The Quiet Life”), betrays the deep irony embedded within this film from Matarrese, a master of the conversational documentary, with a script by himself and Nico Morabito. His last work, GEN_ [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Gianluca Matarrese
film profile], which premiered at Sundance earlier this year, tracks a series of interactions between one doctor and his many patients – a powerful engagement with the biopolitical complex as told through conversations. In I Want Her Dead, he turns the camera on a matter even closer to him, all with a similar attention to capturing what’s between the lines in a combination of non-fiction and fictional elements.

Matarrese opens the movie, which is “based on a true story”, like a tragicomic opera – at times very soapy – framed like a feud between warring families. However, it’s actually one family: his own, living in rural Calabria. Two groups, on opposite sides of the ruins of an amphitheatre, like parts of a Greek chorus, begin a verbal faceoff of brutal jabs and barbs. The central players are two matriarch-like figures, Maria Luisa Magno and her sister-in-law, Imma Capalbo. But humorously, we quickly learn that it’s a fight over who’s paying for housing renovation, the two sides sharing different levels of the same housing complex.

Combining the grounded with the theatrical, Matarrese at times even gives the tale an almost western vibe. The filmmaker reveals the family’s secrets through heated arguments and complaint sessions, the dynamics and alliances emerging like tangled grapevines. We’re rarely privy to names and instead must be reliant on each distinct persona, carved out carefully through mannerisms and dress – puffy jackets and sharp lipstick, for instance. One can’t help but feel rapt by some of the pettiness that, ultimately, in the framework of families, is more like life or death.

Matarrese graciously keeps the film under 90 minutes, which saves the viewer from getting exhausted by the repetition inherent in the structure of their constant arguments. Careful comedy breaks up the drama, where social-media sales pitches and reels burst in on the feud that both separates and binds them. I Want Her Dead exists in a state of heightened reality for the majority of its running time, bookended by elements that are more clearly inserted for the sake of stimulating a more fictionalised context. Regardless of what’s “real” and what’s “crafted” for the screen, Matarrese offers us an entertaining time, reminding us that life can often be louder and more extreme than we expect it to be.

I Want Her Dead is an Italian-Swiss co-production staged by Faber Produzioni, Stemal Entertainment, RAI Cinema, Elefant Films Sàrl and RSI – Radiotelevisione Svizzera di Lingua Italiana. Mediawan Rights is managing its world sales.

Photogallery 31/08/2025: Venice 2025 - Il quieto vivere

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Gianluca Matarrese
© 2025 Isabeau de Gennaro for Cineuropa @iisadege