Donato (Malich Cissé, an Apulian actor of Senegalese origin) is a twenty-year-old from Bari who was adopted and later abandoned, and who gets by on odd jobs while taking care of his grandmother who lives with Alzheimer’s (Lucia Zotti). One evening, crook on the run Agust (Giulio Beranek) forces Donato to hide him in his car. But when the latter makes a smooth manoeuvre at a traffic light to hide them from a police car, it changes everything. Agust gifts Donato a gold necklace to reward his efforts, and when Donato loses his job in a pizzeria and needs money for his grandmother, he asks Agust to bring him into the fray as a driver.

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The influence of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive and Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver [+lee también:
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ficha de la película] is clear in these opening sequences. But Davide Angiuli - who presented his debut feature film On Edge in the Italian Film Competition of BIF&ST ahead of its release in Italian cinemas on 26 March via Notorious Pictures - transposes that narrative model to a radically different context. There’s no glamour or glossy aesthetic here: the Barese outskirts are claustrophobic, dirty and inescapable. Director of photography Emilio M. Costa films the actors’ faces close-up, with a narrow focus, and often silhouetted against natural light, blurring what’s around the protagonists. The effect is visually oppressive, reflecting the existential cage in which they’re living.

Albanian Agust initiates Donato into the crime world through insults and slaps. He does so out of friendship, not knowing how else to connect. There’s a homoerotic subtext to Agust’s gestures, which never explodes but which does permeate the bond developing between the pair, based upon physical and verbal violence. Their shared language is the Barese dialect, which requires subtitles for non-Apulian viewers. This language becomes a meeting point, a means to integrate within a region which exploits them but doesn’t even see them. Both are invisible foreigners: at one point, the crime boss who tasks Agust with thefts and other offences turns to Donato, who’s black, and says "he’s Albanian like you", cancelling out his identity by reducing him to a single category of otherness.

We see Donato entering into Agust’s family: Albanians who have fled their country and who live according to the Kanun - an ancient code of honour which the latter’s mother (Ema Andrea) follows to the letter. Agult’s little sister Erina (Romina De Giglio) wants to break free from this suffocating tradition and sees Donato as a possible means of escape. For a brief moment in time, Donato gets a taste of what it means to belong to a family.

The pace of the film is frenetic, thanks to Massimo Ruggiero’s rapid-fire cutting, and is further accelerated by Carlo Giannico’s original tech house music. The dialogue is similarly hectic, heightening the dramatic tension in the story. Over time, Angiuli creates a spiral of violence which slowly closes in on his protagonists, who are all trapped in lives they haven’t chosen for themselves.

The film’s strength is that it stays true to the sociological reality of the region – the invisibility of immigrants, exploitation, dialect as an identity code – with the director’s personal approach to film direction reminiscent of other recent European examples. The tension between integration and belonging, between biological family and chosen family, is resolved formulaically, but with a level of complexity which is ultimately in line with the urgency of the story and the power of the two protagonists’ performances.

On Edge was produced by Movimento Film, Oz Film, Verdeoro and Notorious Pictures in collaboration with Rai Cinema. World sales are entrusted to Intramovies.