La Grazia

dir. Paolo Sorrentino · 2025

Snapshot

La Grazia is Paolo Sorrentino's tenth feature, an Italian-language political and moral drama built around Toni Servillo as Mariano De Santis, a fictional, devoutly Catholic President of Italy in the final months of his seven-year term. The Italian title carries a deliberate double charge: grazia means both "grace" in the theological sense and the presidential power of clemency — the pardon (grazia) that an Italian head of state may grant to convicted prisoners. The film braids two strands of conscience around that pun. De Santis must decide whether to sign into law a bill legalizing euthanasia in a Catholic country, and he must rule on two petitions for clemency, each involving a spouse who killed a partner. Threading both is his relationship with his daughter and chief legal adviser, Dorotea (Anna Ferzetti), and the lingering grief of his late wife. The film opened the 82nd Venice International Film Festival in competition on 27 August 2025, where Servillo took the Volpi Cup for Best Actor; it reached Italian theaters on 15 January 2026. Critically it was received as a notably restrained, late-style Sorrentino — less the operatic maximalist of The Great Beauty than a chamber moralist working in muted registers.

Industry & production

La Grazia was produced through Sorrentino's own company, Numero 10, with The Apartment Pictures (the prestige-cinema arm of the Fremantle group, long associated with producer Lorenzo Mieli) and Fremantle itself, with Sorrentino and Annamaria Morelli credited as producers. Italian distribution was handled by PiperFilm, with Warner Bros. Entertainment Italia involved in the release; the film runs 133 minutes. This places the project squarely within the European auteur-festival economy that has underwritten Sorrentino's career since his Netflix-era expansion: a director with international financing and streaming-adjacent backers who nonetheless continues to make Italian-language films premiering on the festival circuit. Choosing La Grazia as the Venice curtain-raiser — Sorrentino is a Venice fixture, and his Youth, The Hand of God, and Parthenope all had high-profile bows — signals the festival's continued investment in him as a flagship national auteur. Reported worldwide grosses were modest by blockbuster standards (in the low eight figures, the bulk earned domestically in Italy), consistent with a subtitled prestige drama whose commercial life runs through awards season and arthouse exhibition rather than wide release. As with reception specifics for any very recent film, granular budget and recoupment figures are not reliably in the public record, and I won't invent them.

Technology

Sorrentino has worked digitally for years, and La Grazia was captured and finished in that idiom, its images shaped substantially in the color grade — the velvety blacks, controlled contrast, and saturated nocturnes that have become a house signature. Cinematographer Daria D'Antonio and Sorrentino are repeatedly described as color-coordinating the frame, building interiors out of deep shadow and isolating figures against the night lights of Rome. Beyond that, the specific camera and lens packages are not something the public record makes clear, and I won't guess at model numbers. What is worth noting technologically is the score's character: rather than a traditional orchestral cue-sheet, the film leans on an electronic score (credited to Fabrizio Elvetico, Marco Messina, and Sacha Ricci) and incorporated contemporary Italian popular music, including an appearance by the rapper Guè as himself. The "technology" of the film, in other words, is as much about a synth-and-rap sound design rubbing against august widescreen images as about capture hardware.

Technique

Cinematography

D'Antonio, who became Sorrentino's director of photography on The Hand of God (2021) after the long Luca Bigazzi era and continued on Parthenope (2024), gives La Grazia the sharp, lacquered surface associated with the director while pulling the palette toward something more somber, even mournful. Reviewers single out interiors drowned in black, precise and frontal compositions, and a recurring motif of the President framed against the twinkling skyline of Rome — an image that lends the character an almost extraterrestrial isolation, a man sealed inside the Quirinale and inside his own deliberation. The camera is less restless than in Sorrentino's set-piece films; the grandeur is held in reserve and deployed sparingly, which several critics read as evidence of a more disciplined visual rhetoric.

Editing

Cristiano Travaglioli, Sorrentino's editor across virtually his entire filmography (from Il Divo onward), again cuts the picture. Sorrentino's editorial signature — abrupt, music-driven transitions, montage interludes that break from narrative time, sudden tonal pivots from solemnity to absurdist comedy — is present but, by consensus, dialed back. Some reviewers found the transitions and needle-drops occasionally jarring against the film's more elegiac passages, a sign of the friction between Sorrentino's montage instincts and the chamber-drama material.

Mise-en-scène / staging

The film's stage is the apparatus of the Italian presidency: official residences, ministerial chambers, the rituals of state, and the enclosed domestic world the widowed President shares with his daughter. Costume designer Carlo Poggioli dresses the institution with the tailored formality the milieu demands. Sorrentino stages much of the drama as conversation and deliberation — two people in a room weighing law against conscience — which is itself the mark of the more restrained mode, a retreat from the carnivalesque processions and parties of earlier work toward the intimate two-hander.

Sound

Sound is one of the film's most discussed and divisive elements. The decision to score a stately presidential drama with electronic textures, techno pulses, and Italian rap creates pointed tonal contrast; the score reportedly swells toward more classical grandeur in the emotional crescendos. For admirers, this is the Sorrentino frisson — the friction of high and low, sacred and profane. For detractors, the music selections sit uneasily with the film's lusher, more mournful imagery.

Performance

The performance ledger is dominated by Servillo, whose Volpi Cup-winning turn was widely called among the finest of his career. The praise centers on economy: where Sorrentino characters often declaim, De Santis is built from restraint, weariness, and a contained interior grace, the President's moral exhaustion legible in small gestures. Anna Ferzetti as Dorotea — daughter, confidante, and legal mind — functions as the film's second center of gravity and its moral interlocutor; her work was recognized with the Pasinetti Award at Venice. Massimo Venturiello plays the Minister of Justice Ugo Romani, with Orlando Cinque, Milvia Marigliano, and others in support.

Narrative & dramatic mode

The dramatic mode is deliberative rather than eventful: a film of decisions, not actions. Its engine is the moral dilemma, stated almost as a syllogism — on the euthanasia bill, the President frames his bind as "if I don't sign, I'm a torturer; if I sign, I'm a murderer." The two clemency petitions (a respected teacher who mercy-killed his suffering wife; a young woman convicted of murdering her husband) operate as parallel cases that pressure the gap between law and truth, mercy and justice. Sorrentino structures this less as a thriller of political maneuvering than as a sustained meditation, punctuated by his characteristic digressions, comic grace notes, and lyrical interludes. The father-daughter relationship supplies the emotional throughline: Dorotea's prison visit to one applicant reorients her — and the film's — sense of freedom and duty, and the President's grief for his late wife shadows every choice. It is, in form, closer to a contemplative late-style drama than to the propulsive Il Divo.

Genre & cycle

The film sits at the intersection of the political film and the intimate character study, with a strong undertow of the mortality drama that has run through Sorrentino's recent work (Youth, The Hand of God, Parthenope). Within his own output it belongs to a "men of Italian power" cycle alongside Il Divo (Giulio Andreotti) and Loro (Silvio Berlusconi) — but it inverts their satire. Where those films anatomized corruption and appetite, La Grazia imagines an essentially honest, principled head of state, a counter-portrait that several critics read as a wistful, even idealized vision of "what a politician should be." It is a political film with little interest in plot mechanics of power and great interest in the conscience that power burdens.

Authorship & method

Sorrentino wrote, directed, and co-produced the film, his customary total-authorship posture. The defining authorial fact of La Grazia is its reunion with Toni Servillo in a leading role — the actor who anchored The Consequences of Love, Il Divo, The Great Beauty, and Loro, and who appeared in smaller parts in The Hand of God and Parthenope. Servillo is Sorrentino's great instrument for depicting solitary, watchful, powerful men, and the President extends that gallery. The other key collaborators are longtime ones: editor Cristiano Travaglioli and cinematographer Daria D'Antonio, the latter representing the most significant craft evolution of Sorrentino's late period as she has carried forward and inflected the visual language established under Bigazzi. A notable departure from method is the music: rather than the orchestral/curated scores associated with his regular composer Lele Marchitelli, Sorrentino built the soundtrack around an electronic team (Elvetico, Messina, Ricci) and contemporary pop. The method overall is recognizably Sorrentino — a screenplay of aphorism and moral paradox, images of cool grandeur, tonal whiplash between the sublime and the everyday — applied at lower volume.

Movement / national cinema

La Grazia is a thoroughly Italian film, and Sorrentino remains the most internationally visible standard-bearer of contemporary Italian cinema after Matteo Garrone. His lineage is frequently traced to Federico Fellini — the processional spectacle and Roman melancholy of La grande bellezza made the comparison canonical — and the engagement with Italian political life recalls the cinema impegnato tradition of Francesco Rosi and Elio Petri, even as Sorrentino's irony and ornamentation set him apart from their austerity. Casting Anna Ferzetti, daughter of the actor Gabriele Ferzetti (of Antonioni's L'Avventura and Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West), threads a small filament back into that national-cinema heritage. The film's preoccupation with the Quirinale and the rituals of the Republic situates it firmly within an Italian conversation about the moral office of the presidency.

Era / period

The film arrives in the mid-2020s, a moment in which Sorrentino, having cycled through international English-language projects (This Must Be the Place, the Young/New Pope series) and a confessional autobiographical turn (The Hand of God), has settled into a reflective late phase. La Grazia extends the chastened, mortality-haunted register of that phase. Its subject — euthanasia, the right to die, the conscience of a Catholic state — is contemporary and pointed, engaging live debates in Italian law and the Church's continuing cultural weight. The period flavor also registers in its sound, where techno and Italian rap mark the film as a 2020s artifact even as its imagery reaches for timeless grandeur.

Themes

The governing theme is grace in its doubled sense: divine mercy and the sovereign's pardon, and the unbearable proximity of the two when a believer holds the power to forgive, to permit dying, and to refuse. From this flow the film's other concerns: the gap between law and truth, dramatized by clemency cases where legal guilt and moral reality diverge; mortality and mourning, embodied in a widower contemplating a euthanasia bill while grieving his wife; conscience versus office, the cost exacted on an honest man by the duty to decide; and fatherhood and inheritance, in the intellectual and moral partnership between De Santis and Dorotea. Underlying all of it is an idealist's question, unusual for Sorrentino's satirical politics — what integrity in public life might actually look like — answered through patience, fortitude, and restraint rather than spectacle.

Reception, canon & influence

Critical reception was broadly favorable and frequently framed around the word "restraint." Reviews aggregated to a strong majority-positive consensus, the throughline being that this is an atypically sober, mature Sorrentino reuniting him with the "majestic" Servillo, whose performance drew near-unanimous acclaim and the Venice Volpi Cup; Anna Ferzetti received the festival's Pasinetti Award, and Sorrentino's screenplay was later honored at the Chicago International Film Festival. Dissenting notices found the film hollow or inert beneath its polish, or faulted the music-image fit. The film competed for but did not win the Golden Lion.

Looking backward, the influences ON the film are legible: Fellini's Roman grandeur and melancholy; the Italian political-cinema tradition of Rosi and Petri, here softened and interiorized; and Sorrentino's own Il Divo and Loro, which La Grazia answers by inverting their portraits of venal power into a study of an honest one. Its late-style hush extends the lineage of Youth and The Hand of God. Looking forward, its legacy is by definition unsettled this close to release; what can be said responsibly is that it consolidates Sorrentino's late, quieter manner and reaffirms the Sorrentino–Servillo partnership as one of the defining director-actor collaborations of 21st-century European cinema. Whether La Grazia enters the durable canon alongside Il Divo and The Great Beauty or is remembered as a distinguished minor key is a judgment the historical record cannot yet make, and I won't pretend otherwise.