“Sometimes it just so happens that you meet the wrong people. Tonight, it’s happened to you”. A young man is abducted while leaving a nightclub and, shortly afterwards, he’s thrown inside a moving truck where he’s forced to fight a stranger in the dark with no holds barred and no explanation. All he knows is that only one of them will make it out of that truck alive. In this sense, winning the challenge means saving his skin, but it also marks a point of no return: “Your old life no longer exists. Now you’re a dog”. Bare Hands by Mauro Mancini - hitting Italian cinemas on 5 June via Medusa Film, having premiered in Rome Film Fest’s Grand Public section back in October and having screened out of competition in the Milan Film Festival in recent days - is a ferocious film immersed in the world of underground fighting and exploring blame, revenge and forgiveness through the story of two men who are desperate in different ways and who each have a score to settle.

To begin with, Davide (Francesco Gheghi) seems to have been chosen at random from among so many other options. Much further into the film, however, we learn this simply isn’t the case, but, in the meantime, for the entire first half of the film, we follow the young protagonist as he sinks into the hell of a cargo ship under the aegis of his jailer Minuto (Alessandro Gassmann), who starts training him for extreme fights and shows him no mercy. There are other men on the ship too, divided between “big dogs” and “small dogs”, trained to kill and ready for the next fight as punters place their bets. At times, it’s an unbearable watch, filled with kicks, blood and disfigured faces, and at a certain point we can’t help but ask whether it’s really necessary to linger on violence for violence’s sake for such a long time. Now on his second feature film after Thou Shalt Not Hate [+lee también:
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ficha de la película] (which also explored a sense of guilt by way of Alessandro Gassmann), Mancini has loosely adapted Paola Barbato’s novel of the same name, which won the Giorgio Scerbanenco Prize in 2008, for this movie. He borrows from arthouse film noir and depicts dehumanised characters wrestling with the consequences of their own actions. “I did something horrible before ending up here”, Davide confesses after winning his umpteenth fight. The young man begins to believe he deserves his fate. But would it be possible for him to escape?

This brutal, adrenaline-fuelled first half is followed by a more emotional second section of the film which opens itself up to hope, where the story totally changes course and a young woman called Eva (Fotinì Peluso) makes an appearance, offering the possibility of a new life. The sudden change in tone might unsettle some, but it’s at this point that the pieces of the puzzle finally come together and the hidden thread binding Davide and Minuto together ultimately emerges, the two of them now partners in seeking redemption. But the past catches up with them again, and the net (visually represented by the truck which drives round in circles) has to close in on them somehow. Francesco Gheghi (named Best Actor in the 2024 Venice Film Festival’s Orizzonti section for his part in Familia [+lee también:
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Bare Hands was produced by Eagle Original Content, Pepito Produzioni and Movimento Film in league with RAI Cinema and is sold worldwide by Vision Distribution.