The Favorited Son: Landucci Looks at How Love Can Tear Us Apart
While it never explicitly dwells on the feeling that the film’s patriarch may have been dealt the ultimate short end of the stick, Tommaso Landucci’s fiction debut is the portrait of a father who momentarily allows himself to inhabit the mentor and lineage-making side of fatherhood (something impossible with his cerebral palsy afflicted son) feels emotionally sincere and powerfully authentic, largely thanks to a beautifully restrained Riccardo Scamarcio. Children of the Monkey (I figli della scimmia) sees a main performance that captures the complicated mixture of love, guilt, longing and projection that makes a father’s attachment to his boy feel less like a betrayal than an unsettling glimpse of the guardian he imagined he might become. It makes for compelling cinema but reaches the limit of where it can psychologically move towards.
It all begins quite innocently enough. An old dirt bike is pulled out from the cobwebs and wishes that one person might have (also in permanent storage) rise to the surface. Landucci’s screenplay alongside Damiano Femfert is about parenthood’s most uncomfortable contradiction: the possibility of loving your child completely while still mourning the child you imagined having. Dario’s increasingly intense relationship with his teenage nephew awakens something he has never allowed himself to confront. In the boy, Dario begins to see the son he once imagined — healthy, uncomplicated, perhaps closer to the version of fatherhood he had expected — and gradually slips into a dangerous fantasy of becoming the father he might have been. The first to notice is his wife (Lydia Liberman) who gradually needs to do double duty in terms of cerebral care.
Landucci turns that cruel imbalance into a metaphor for Dario’s unknown desire of wanting not a real child but rather an ideal child and this is where acceptance and regret, generosity and selfishness can co-exist — further explored by his brother (Fausto Russo Alesi) not having the son he might have wanted, and the grandfather opting to pour concrete into the ground to make a swimming pool over cementing a stronger bound with his adult sons. The danger is not simply that Dario becomes attached to his nephew, but that the attachment exposes how much of his identity has been constructed around sacrifice. His care for his disabled child has become inseparable from an unspoken sense of the life he might have had, and the nephew’s presence threatens to tear that carefully maintained equilibrium apart.
Landucci’s most daring move is to approach the taboo at the centre of the story without pretending it is easy to resolve. The film asks what happens when the fantasy of the child a parent wanted suddenly appears in front of them — not as an abstract possibility, but as another actual person. In doing so, Children of the Monkey turns a family drama into something darker and more psychologically complex: a study of the gap between the child we love, the child we imagined, and the parent we imagined ourselves becoming.
Reviewed on September 7th at the 2026 Venice Film Festival (83rd edition) – Orizzonti. 110 Minutes.
★★½/☆☆☆☆☆
