85 min | R | November 19, 2021 | Lionsgate
A soldier moves through a Rome emptied by lockdown, hunting a plot against the Vatican while his radical twin sits in a cell. Abel Ferrara films the whole thing in paranoid near-darkness where every screen is watching back. The dread is real. The plot is a rumor.
Abel Ferrara drops a soldier into a locked-down, COVID-emptied Rome and lets the city become a surveillance nightmare. Ethan Hawke plays JJ, an American operative moving through curfew streets to stop a plot against the Vatican. His radical twin brother Justin sits in custody, and the film blurs which man it is following. This is not a thriller about stopping a bomb. It is a film about a man stripped of certainty in a world where every image is suspect and every contact carries threat.
Hawke gives JJ a coiled, watchful exhaustion. He keeps his face still and his eyes moving, a professional who trusts nothing he sees. As Justin, Hawke shifts into rage and conviction, a man who burns where his brother calculates. The two performances refuse to clarify each other. Cristina Chiriac plays a laughing Russian agent who treats the danger as a private joke. Valerio Mastandrea appears as Luciano, grounding a stretch of the film in something close to ordinary menace.
Ferrara writes and directs in a register that punishes anyone wanting a clean plot. He shoots Rome in near-darkness, and Sean Price Williams photographs the curfew streets in murky digital low light that smears faces into the shadows. The image quality itself becomes the subject. Phones, monitors, and night-vision feeds stack screens inside the frame until you cannot tell observation from paranoia. Ferrara bookends the film with Hawke speaking directly to camera, breaking the fiction and daring you to take any of it at face value.
This is Ferrara working in pure mood and dread, with the narrative sanded down to fragments. The murk is deliberate and the incoherence is partly the point, but the film leans so far into atmosphere that it loses its grip on consequence. What holds is the feeling of a man alone in a dead city, certain only that he is being watched. Hawke commits fully to a film that will not meet him halfway. The result is unsettling and frustrating in roughly equal measure.