Superheroes

Forget the multiverse. Forget the capes, the radioactive spiders, and the billionaire orphans with bat fixations. In Paolo Genovese’s 2021 film Superheroes (Supereroi), the titular champions don't save the world from alien invasions. Instead, they attempt something far more hazardous: they try to stay in love for over a decade without making each other miserable.

I discovered this film purely by accident while scrolling through a streaming library that felt like a digital graveyard of "suggested for you" titles. I was actually in the middle of a deeply frustrating battle with a half-eaten bag of stale pretzels that refused to open, and somehow, watching two people struggle to open up to each other for two hours felt like the perfect emotional pairing. It’s a film that seems to have vanished into the cracks of the post-pandemic cinematic landscape—its recorded domestic box office of $882 suggests that literally tens of people saw it in a theater—but it deserves a much larger audience.

Physics, Cartoons, and the Rain

The setup feels like a classic "meet-cute" turned on its head. Marco (Alessandro Borghi) is a physics teacher who views the world through the lens of cold, hard constants and predictable outcomes. Anna (Jasmine Trinca) is a rebellious cartoonist who thrives on the chaotic and the impulsive. They meet under a shared porch during a torrential downpour—the kind of cinematic rain that usually signals a lifetime of bliss.

But Genovese, who previously gave us the delightfully cynical Perfect Strangers, isn’t interested in the honeymoon phase. He’s interested in the "ten years later" phase where the honeymoon is a distant memory and the luggage is heavy. The film’s central conceit is that staying together for a decade is a superpower because it requires a blatant disregard for the laws of emotional physics. Anna even draws a comic strip titled "Superheroes" about couples who manage to endure. It’s a bit on the nose, sure, but in an era of "disposable everything," there’s something genuinely radical about celebrating the sheer endurance of a long-term relationship.

A Timeline Like a Scattered Puzzle

The most striking thing about Superheroes is its non-linear structure. We aren't told the story from point A to point B. Instead, we hopscotch through time. One minute we’re in 2010 watching the sparks fly; the next, it’s 2018 and the air is thick with unspoken resentments.

At first, I found the jumping around a bit disorienting—I kept looking for grey hair or different iPhones to figure out where we were in the timeline—but it eventually clicks. This is how memory actually works. When you think about a partner, you don't think in a straight line; you remember the fight you had yesterday alongside the way they looked on a beach five years ago.

Alessandro Borghi and Jasmine Trinca are the reasons this works. Their chemistry is so natural that I’m convinced they must have been a real couple in a past life, or at least shared a very stressful mortgage. Borghi plays Marco with a lovely, grounded vulnerability, while Trinca’s Anna is the perfect whirlwind of creative energy and hidden pain. They make the small moments—a look across a dinner table, a specific way of arguing about a vacation—feel more epic than any CGI-heavy sky beam.

The Contemporary Struggle

Released in the wake of the pandemic, Superheroes feels like a product of its time in how it handles isolation and connection. While the film doesn't explicitly focus on COVID, it captures that "trapped in a room with your choices" vibe that many of us got to know intimately during lockdown. It’s a film for the streaming era—intimate, dialogue-driven, and perfectly suited for a quiet night where you’re prepared to feel a little bit called out by the screen.

In the current landscape of franchise dominance, a movie like this is a "forgotten curiosity" simply because it doesn't have a hook beyond "being a human is hard." It’s an Italian drama that avoids the postcard-pretty clichés of most Mediterranean exports. Yes, the cinematography by Fabrizio Lucci is gorgeous, but it captures the grey, rainy streets of Milan just as often as the sun-drenched coast. It feels lived-in.

If there’s a flaw, it’s that the film occasionally leans a bit too hard into the melodrama in its final act. It wants to ensure you’re crying, which feels slightly manipulative compared to the organic wit of the first hour. However, the emotional payoff is earned because we’ve spent so much time in the trenches with these two.

Ultimately, Superheroes is a beautifully acted, structurally ambitious look at the "boring" parts of love that turn out to be the most heroic. It’s a movie that argues that the bravest thing you can do is show up for someone else, day after day, even when the physics of the relationship don't quite add up. If you can find it on a streaming service or a dusty digital shelf, give it a look. It’s a reminder that the most compelling special effect in cinema is still just two talented people looking at each other like they might actually stay.

Just make sure you have a fresh bag of pretzels. Stale ones really ruin the mood.