VENICE 2020: The Predators
venice 2020Serving as both Pietro Castellitto's directorial and screenwriting feature debut, The Predators aims to capture the darker side within most. Using comedy, the film follows multiple individuals who for various reasons, end up on a collision course with each other leading to not just an entertaining filmmaking debut but one that shows legitimate depth and promise for social commentary.
Where The Predators thrives is in its comedic roots. The screenplay from Pietro Castellitto embraces a dry sense of humor that shines wonderfully throughout the feature. The comedy is the perfect mixture of absurdity and awkwardness that clearly is crafted without trivializing itself at any point. Every character is over the top in the best of ways that serves the purpose of allowing the over the top dialogue and humor to fit in naturally within the film's world. A strong screenplay only can do so much in this regard as much of the effectiveness of this style of comedy rests on the performances. This uncanny blend of quiet reality and over the top characters can often result in confused performances that never quite find their footing, yet this is another area where The Predators shines. Where the film bounces around between perspectives to the point where there isn't a main actor who quite steals the show, it felt like everyone was able to buy in and understand their roles providing layered performances that were thoughtful of the goals of each individual scene, while also coming together into coherent overall performances which is a sign of a great relationship between actor, director, and screenplay.
The comedy within The Predators is masterful but in its social commentary the film struggles. The chaotic narrative that the film embraces, jumping between various characters drastically hurts the films ability to build captivating narratives for its characters. As one starts to form the film is quick to switch to a new voice not allowing the commentary to ever truly reach the depth or nuance that it could. The one area where it truly feels like the depth of the film fails is in its commentary regarding fascism. The Predators will alienate much of its audience with how it handles certain characters fascism, often trying to justify or redeem these characters in a matter that felt rather empty and tone deaf.
Even if The Predators isn't a masterpiece in its social commentary and pacing, there is clearly enough good within the film to feel rewarding and worthwhile to check out. There are countless experienced filmmakers who couldn't pull off what Pietro Castellitto accomplishes in his feature debut and immediately Castellitto cements himself as a promising voice to watch both as a director and screenwriter and with a cleaner social commentary, it would not be the least surprising if the filmmaker had a masterpiece on his horizon sooner rather than later.
