VENICE 2026 International Film Critics’ Week
Review: Giaffa the Great
- VENICE 2026: Marco Santi’s feature debut turns one man’s crisis of invisibility into a darkly grotesque, Pirandellian game of masks, performance and borrowed identity
Giacomo Falta (Edoardo Pesce) is the kind of man the world seems to have quietly stopped noticing. He works for his father-in-law’s newspaper, where even his attempts at professional relevance backfire: an enthusiastic piece on a fashionable ramen restaurant becomes an embarrassment when the place is exposed as a scam serving frozen food. At home, things are not much better. His exacting wife and young son appear to inhabit a life from which Giacomo has somehow become detached, present but never quite central.
That changes when the family attends the hottest theatre show in town, starring the absurdly celebrated Great Giason (Roberto Zibetti). Everyone around Giacomo is mesmerised; he alone seems able to perceive the emptiness beneath the performer’s charisma. Yet rather than rejecting Giason, he becomes fascinated by the mechanism itself: how can a man apparently offering nothing exercise such complete power over a room?
From this contradiction, Marco Santi builds Giaffa the Great, the opening film of this year’s Venice International Film Critics' Week. A chance encounter gives Giacomo the opportunity to appropriate Giason’s identity for a day, and another misunderstanding rechristens him “Giaffa”. What follows is an increasingly surreal nocturnal odyssey in which impersonation becomes less a comic disguise than an experiment in self-erasure.
The pic’s most stimulating layer is unmistakably Pirandellian. Santi and co-writers Lorenzo Bagnatori and Eva De Prosperis treat identity as something unstable, negotiated through the gaze of others, and therefore open to performance, rejection and theft. Giacomo does not simply want to become Giason; he wants to discover whether being perceived differently might make him different. The irony, of course, is that the borrowed mask gradually reveals as much about the man beneath it as it conceals.
Santi pushes this psychological premise through a heightened, deliberately artificial register. The Piedmont setting, shot largely in darkness, feels curiously sealed off from contemporary Italy: a gloomy, almost timeless province populated by anxious petit-bourgeois figures and working-class outsiders. Stefano Usberghi’s cinematography reinforces the sense of a world slightly removed from reality, whilst Daniele De Virgilio’s score wisely avoids over-explaining the transformation. A recurring sonic motif marks the slippage between Falta and Giaffa, but does so with enough restraint to remain suggestive, rather than schematic.
Pesce is especially well suited to the material. His physicality can carry both humiliation and menace, allowing Giacomo’s metamorphosis to feel comic, pathetic and faintly dangerous at once. Carlotta Gamba brings an effective ambiguity to the young woman who encounters Giaffa along the way, while Zibetti, in relatively few scenes, makes Giason memorably repellent: vain, slippery and somehow convincing precisely because there appears to be so little behind the pose.
Not everything lands with equal force, and the film occasionally seems a little too pleased with its own grotesque flourishes. But its narrative remains surprisingly linear without becoming too predictable, and the humour of its first half gradually gives way to something more disquieting. As a debut, Giaffa the Great is a distinctive proposition within contemporary Italian cinema: a bizarre, theatrical and psychologically alert tale about the seduction of becoming someone else, and the harder task of returning to oneself.
Giaffa the Great was produced by 10D Film (Italy) and Andromeda Film (Italy), in collaboration with Rai Cinema (Italy). True Colours is handling the feature’s international sales.
Photogallery 03/09/2026: Venice 2026 - Il grande Giaffa
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© 2026 Isabeau de Gennaro for Cineuropa @iisadege
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