The Monster of Florence

(Il Mostro, Netflix, 4 episodes, Italy, 2025)

In the relentless flood of movies and series released via streaming, there are, inevitably, some unfortunate casualties. Although The Monster of Florence – the original title, just Il Mostro (The Monster), is far better and more expressive of what the series is really all about – has apparently rated as “most viewed” on Netflix within some fiercely circumscribed demographic period, it has also been critically pilloried from virtually every corner. And this snap judgement (all judgements these days, alas, are snap) seems to me to be the result of a profound confusion and misunderstanding.

It seems that there has been a vibe shift sometime during 2025 (poor me, I didn’t get the memo) in relation to true-crime-related series (and books and podcasts and everything else). Has there just been too much of the stuff? (I intensely like all ‘too much’ arguments’ about culture: too much sex, too many images, too many songs … ) Has our fascination/desensitisation at last somersaulted into righteous disgust? Have we had enough? Check the social-media vibe-clock next week to be fed the answer!

Specifically, Il Mostro appeared just weeks after Monster: The Ed Gein Story, the latest fantasia from the Ryan Murphy stable (although it was showran – is that a word? – by Ian Brennan): a truly appalling series. Dopey, hysterical-for-the-hell-of-it, sensational and topical in all the worst ways, it’s hard to pick its worst sequence: hallucinating (because of sexual repression) Anthony Perkins discovering the meticulous simulacra of vaginas-collected-in-a-box possibly placed for him there by sick and perverted Alfred Hitchcock on the set of Psycho (1960) – we even see the obese Hitch, later, awkwardly and sleazily stooping to perve through a keyhole like Norman Bates; or the sight of a daydreaming, frustrated Tobe Hooper ripping through a line of customers at the appliance store with a handy chainsaw (excuse me, chain saw)? It went crashing from one catastrophe to the next in its feeble attempt to capture not just the reality, but ‘the story’ (i.e., the pop culture mythology) of Gein. Snap verdict from me: Worst Series of 2025!

But The Monster is not Monster – not for a single second. The sex-murder crimes committed between the late 1960s and the mid ‘80s in and around Florence are indeed hideous and grotesque in themselves, but Stefano Sollima (sole director and co-writer of all episodes with Leonardo Fasoli) always treats them in a non-graphic, relatively discreet way; as used to happen with Brian De Palma movies of the ‘80s, some viewers are imagining more than they are actually given to see here. Although ‘cutting to a long shot’ at the moment of peak violence has itself long become a televisual cliché, one that supposedly signals ‘correct critical distance’ on the director’s part, Sollima uses the technique as an utterly coherent part of an entire stylistic ensemble. Distance is indeed a key card in his directorial strategies.

A major element in the ensemble is darkness; I mean pure, total darkness. It has a documentary justification: not many lights (seemingly none!) along these long roads in and out of the city, and definitely not in the improvised ‘lovers’ lanes’ dotted everywhere in this landscape (which are almost as numerous as the voyeurs who dart around the bushes observing both the sex and the crimes – this apparently real ‘network’ of peepers is deftly conveyed). Sollima not only darkens down most interiors, he goes all the way with the exterior vistas: sometimes just a single car light slowly fading away in the distance in a sea of black. Drone shots gain a new, salutary force of negativity within this style! At many moments, the series recalls another pitch-black, mostly nature-set, frankly experimental film about a serial killer: Philippe Grandrieux’s Sombre (1998).

Let’s get to the heart of Il Mostro, and what has been most misunderstood about it. Complainers have raged that the series is emptily repetitive, narratively confusing as it jumps across diverse timelines between the 1950s and the ‘80s, pointless (or just opportunistic) in its open-ended mystery, and prurient in its concentration on the grisly murders. None of this is – objectively! – correct. The premise of the narrative structure is explained by a chief investigator (Liliana Bottone as Silvia Della Monica) right up front: in the early ‘80s, a decision is made to ‘flip the case upside down’ and look for a possible precedent early in time; the series (as Sollima has made perfectly clear in interviews, as well in the credits of the series itself) is entirely based on, and limited to, this particular phase of the events.

The time-flip takes us back a very similar murder in the ‘60s, and from there to the beginning of the unhappy marriage of Stefano Mele (Marco Bullitta) and Barbara Locci (Francesca Olia) in the late ‘50s – an event which allows the seemingly incongruous but perfectly logical imagery of a bride, full wedding dress trailing behind her, fleeing through a field, and forcibly brought back to the nest. (A better use of the ‘runaway bride’ motif, to my mind, than in Pablo Larraín’s briefly overrated but also swiftly forgotten Spencer [2021].)

In the extremely complicated – and still unresolved – real-life history of investigation into the Monster of Florence file, this kicks off what is known as the ‘Sardinian trail’ of the 1980s (ensuing decades would also deliver an ‘esoteric trail’, as well as one that forges a poetically apt connection with another maddeningly unsolved mystery: that of USA’s Zodiac killer! And, by the way, a crossover with The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox [2025] doesn’t happen: public prosecutor Giuliano Mignini didn’t obsess on The Monster until the 2000s). Stefano is convicted of murdering Barbara and his lover, and spends six forlorn years in jail as a result.

But Il Mostro keeps digging into this ‘primal scene’ of the 1968 murder, re-showing it in new, hypothetical variations as the circle of suspects keeps getting wider and more twisted-up (and confessions to the lawmakers are either proffered or retracted), involving brothers Salvatore and Francesco Vinci (played, respectively, by Valentino Mannias and Giacomo Fadda). Eventually, our standard assumption of the heterosexual orientation of certain characters is contradicted, giving rise to an altogether different (and even ‘sicker’, more perverse) scenario.

But this is not a story of evil, or psychosis, or inherently degenerate human natures (Brennan’s Monster wildly careens between all three options). It goes beyond the ‘time wastes all investigations’ theme of Fincher’s Zodiac (2007), as well. Its theme is laid out quite clearly from the beginning, although it may take some time to dawn on the viewer (and clearly has still not yet dawned on those who were so hastily dismissive of the series). It’s about the Italian family as a lived ideological institution, the prison of the home, and the patriarchal-heterosexual-marital law enforced – brutally, secretively, perversely – by all members of the tribe: mothers, fathers, grandparents, brothers.

Il Mostro is (far) less a procedural who-did-it thriller than a probe into the question of why so many women are killed within this cultural ambit that is dark in every sense. In fact, looking at the pattern of ultra-tense dinner table scenes across the series – all of them detailing the intimate dynamics of power and control between family members – we find many echoes of the blackest, most despairing, even frankly misanthropic films by Claude Chabrol.

This is a directorial comparison that Sollima fully earns. The consistent quality of his work on this series is awesomely impressive. I have been intrigued by Sollima since seeing the boldly structured Sicario: Day of the Soldado (2018) and his excellent TV series ZeroZeroZero (2020). In a sense, he is somebody handling the shuttle between televisual and cinematic narrative forms better than most; he brings essential elements of each medium into the other, without evident aesthetic loss or excessive awkwardness. His compositional and spatial strategies (foreground and background planes, architectural fixtures that conceal people from our view) from moment to moment of Il Mostro are unfailingly inventive; and his way with a dramatic ‘reveal’ – such as when Stefano (and whomever he was truly with at that moment) discovers, at the murder scene, his little son, Natalino, present in the back seat of the car – is expertly dosed. And there is even an intriguing nod to the sight of ‘schizophrenic’ Alain Delon as the dressed, prone and smoking man on his bed at the start of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï (1967).

In its concluding minutes, the series heavily hints at the likeliest hypothesis, from out of the people focused on in this retelling, concerning the identity of the killer – but also reboots the entire investigative cycle by introducing the person who became the next major suspect, Pietro Pacciani (convicted in 1994, acquitted in ’96, died before his next trial could take place).

It’s easy to leap to the cynical conclusion that Sollima is simply setting up the subject of a 2nd season (it’s too early yet to know whether such a thing will happen). But the way he glancingly depicts Pacciani – in the distance, mainly through sound, situated in a violent, domestic context, about to be reported on by a nervous neighbour – serves, for those who are reading it right, to plunge us back into the all-pervasive, all-important social context … and a world which is indeed capable of effortlessly birthing new monsters at any moment from its occluded, knotted-over womb of darkness.

© Adrian Martin 28 October 2025