The Catholic School

There is a specific, suffocating kind of silence that lives in the hallways of elite private schools—the sound of wealth protecting its own. In Stefano Mordini’s The Catholic School, that silence isn’t just an atmosphere; it’s a co-conspirator. I sat down to watch this on a Tuesday night while intermittently checking if my sourdough starter was actually bubbling, and the domestic mundanity of my kitchen felt like a bizarrely sharp contrast to the casual, upper-middle-class depravity unfolding on my laptop screen.

This film is a fascinating, if deeply uncomfortable, artifact of our current streaming era. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2021 before being tucked away into the vast, often indifferent library of Netflix. It’s the kind of "festival-to-streaming" pipeline release that often gets lost in the shuffle because it doesn’t have a superhero cape or a massive marketing budget. Yet, for those of us who go hunting for international cinema, it offers a chilling look at the "Years of Lead" in Italy through a lens that feels painfully relevant to our modern conversations about toxic masculinity and institutional failure.

The Weight of a 1,200-Page Ghost

The film is an adaptation of Edoardo Albinati’s semi-autobiographical novel, a behemoth that won the prestigious Strega Prize. Trying to cram a 1,200-page meditation on Roman bourgeois life and the 1975 Circeo massacre into 107 minutes is a Herculean task, and you can feel the screenplay sweating under the pressure. Mordini opts for a non-linear structure, jumping between the mundane school days of the boys at San Leone Magno and the horrific night that would eventually change Italian law regarding sexual violence.

We follow Emanuele Maria Di Stefano as Edoardo, our narrator and surrogate for the author. He’s the "good boy" observing a peacock gallery of classmates who range from the merely troubled to the outright sociopathic. There’s a clinical coldness to the way the film introduces us to these boys. They aren't caricatures; they are the sons of doctors and lawyers, the "well-bred" youth of Rome. It’s essentially 'Gossip Girl' directed by Michael Haneke on a very bad day. The film effectively captures how privilege creates a vacuum where empathy simply fails to grow.

Performances in the Heart of Darkness

The heavy lifting here is done by the young ensemble. Giulio Pranno, playing the ringleader Andrea Ghira, carries an unsettling, vacuous energy. He doesn’t look like a monster; he looks like a catalog model for high-end knitwear, which makes his eventual transition into violence all the more jarring. On the other side of the tragedy, Benedetta Porcaroli delivers a harrowing performance as Donatella Colasanti. She has to carry the emotional weight of the film’s final act, and she does so with a raw, terrifying vulnerability that anchors the movie when the script starts to feel too fragmented.

The film excels when it lingers on the "why" rather than the "how." It asks us to look at the environment—the rigid Catholic teachings, the distant parents, the obsession with a certain kind of "virility"—and see how those ingredients can bake into something poisonous. However, the film treats its protagonists like lab rats in a very expensive, very cruel experiment, and sometimes that distance makes it hard to feel anything other than a clinical revulsion. It’s a drama that values observation over catharsis, which might leave some viewers feeling cold.

A Controversial Legacy and the "Why" of Obscurity

One of the most interesting things about The Catholic School isn't even in the movie itself—it’s the reaction it sparked in Italy. Just days before its release, the Italian censorship board slapped it with a VM18 rating (prohibiting those under 18), arguing that the violence was too sensitive for the very demographic it depicts. Mordini was rightfully incensed, noting the irony that a film about the dangers of a sheltered, repressed upbringing was being censored from the youth who might benefit most from its warning.

Why has this film largely vanished from the cultural conversation since 2021? Part of it is the "Netflix dump" phenomenon, but part of it is the sheer difficulty of the subject matter. In an era where "true crime" is often consumed as high-velocity entertainment, The Catholic School refuses to be fun. It’s slow, it’s dense, and it’s deeply cynical about the structures of family and religion. It doesn't offer the easy closure of a Law & Order episode. Instead, it leaves you with the lingering realization that the walls of elite institutions are often built specifically to keep the screams from reaching the street.

While The Catholic School struggles to escape the shadow of its massive source material, it remains a potent, well-acted exploration of how entitlement can curdle into evil. It’s a somber, visually polished drama that demands a strong stomach and a willingness to sit with some very dark questions. It’s not a "comfortable" watch, but in our current moment of reckoning with systemic abuse, it’s a necessary one. If you can handle the bleakness, it’s a hidden gem of modern Italian cinema that deserves more than to be a forgotten thumbnail in a streaming menu.