Review: Children of the Monkey
- VENICE 2026: In Tommaso Landucci’s delicate debut fiction feature, Riccardo Scamarcio plays the lost and bewildered father of a disabled child
In Children of the Monkey by Tommaso Landucci, in competition in the Orizzonti section of the Venice Film Festival, Dario (Riccardo Scamarcio) and his wife (Lidiya Liberman) are a couple living in an unspecified Italian province, parents to a disabled boy of about ten, Enrico (Andrea Aggio). Their lives are completely invested in the care that a quadriplegic boy requires: feeding him, washing him, dressing him, settling him into his wheelchair, and driving him to physiotherapy sessions and to the swimming pool. Like the boy’s mother, Dario does all of this with unwavering care and love, even though it is not easy. A sign of the toll taken by this tireless solicitude is not only the back pain he begins to suffer, but above all the sense of discomfort and suffocation that we can read on the protagonist’s face and in his gestures, heightened by the director’s choice, together with cinematographer Guido Michelotti, to shoot the movie in an unusual format that makes the frame almost square.
Dario works at a large insurance agency with his brother (Fausto Russo Alesi), and the clashes between him and the strict elder sibling, who accuses Dario of always having been superficial (“There’s value in making commitments!”), hint that there's more to the protagonist’s personality. The scene with the family gathered at the grandfather’s (Luigi Diberti) country villa - brothers, wives and grandchildren around a delectable meaty barbecue - instead reveals Dario’s lovely relationship with Giacomo, his brother’s teenage son (Tancredi Naldini). Turning 14 is the occasion to give his nephew an old trail bike, an old passion of Dario’s. He teaches the boy how to ride it and takes him to trial meet-ups in the woods, and in this growing bond we see a desire to escape reality and to assume that “normal” father role that Dario feels he has never been able to take on.
Landucci makes his fiction debut after the documentary Caveman – The Hidden Giant was presented in Venice’s Giornate degli Autori in 2021, and he shows a sure-handed command of writing (the screenplay, co-penned with Damiano Femert, won the 2021 Premio Solinas and the Grand Prize at the Sam Spiegel International Film Lab) and a stripped-down directorial approach. The choice of Scamarcio, who received the script years ago and loved the project to the point of co-producing it, is spot-on. The role of this troubled man seems tailor-made as a new acting challenge for him. Like the monkey in Aesop’s fable (from which Landucci drew the film’s title) who dotes on one offspring at the expense of the other, this man loses himself in his own idealised projection. When he makes a revealing slip, forgetting to pick Enrico up from the pool, there is an inevitable clash with his wife and a stalemate sets in within their already strained relationship. He is confused and takes refuge with his father. While asserting that he adheres to the social model of parental mandate (“What has to be done I do”), Dario is in fact presenting himself as yet another example of the evaporation of the father in our era. He is transferring an adolescent passion onto his nephew, just like those dads who take their kids to a football match when they would secretly rather be studying Chopin at the piano.
Certainly, the birth of a disabled child shatters the dream that both parents have of the “imaginary child” who will meet parental expectations and desires. The director efficiently conveys how a child’s disability transforms the couple’s relationship. Maternal resilience leads to a greater inclination to care for the child, and the father no longer performs the normative function. The search for one’s own way of being a father is more complex than it used to be in the past, teetering between tradition and the role of the “new father”, which this small film depicts with grace.
Children of the Monkey was produced by Lungta Film together with Lebowski and Mosaicon Film. Piperplay is handling its international sales.
(Translated from Italian)
Photogallery 07/09/2026: Venice 2026 - I figli della scimmia
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© 2026 Fabrizio de Gennaro for Cineuropa - fadege.it, @fadege.it
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