Three Floors

There is something uniquely jarring about a car plowing into the ground floor of your life while you’re just trying to exist in a quiet Roman neighborhood. That’s how Nanni Moretti’s Three Floors (2021) kicks off—with a literal collision that shatters the bourgeois peace of an apartment complex and sets a decade-long domino effect in motion. While I watched this, my radiator was making a rhythmic clicking sound that oddly synced up with the film's more anxious moments, making the tension in the room feel much more personal than I probably intended.

It’s a strange beast of a movie. Nanni Moretti is a giant of Italian cinema—the guy who gave us the heartbreaking The Son’s Room—but here he’s doing something different. For the first time in his career, he’s not working from his own original idea. He’s adapted an Israeli novel by Eshkol Nevo, transplanted the action to Rome, and squeezed ten years of tragedy, paranoia, and parenting failures into two hours. In an era where every second drama is being stretched into a ten-episode limited series for a streaming giant, there’s something almost rebellious about Moretti’s decision to keep this as a dense, fast-moving feature.

A Stacked Deck of Misery

The film is divided into three distinct narrative threads, all co-existing within the same walls but feeling worlds apart. On the first floor, we have Lucio, played with a simmering, defensive edge by Riccardo Scamarcio (who you might recognize as the villain from John Wick: Chapter 2). Lucio is a father consumed by the suspicion that his elderly neighbor, who has early-onset dementia, might have done something untoward to his young daughter. It’s a plotline that feels like a thriller but plays out like a slow-motion car crash of bad decisions.

Then there’s the second floor, where Alba Rohrwacher—one of the most soulful actors working today—plays Monica. She’s struggling with the crushing isolation of new motherhood while her husband, Giorgio (Adriano Giannini), is constantly away for work. Her segments are the most atmospheric, bordering on a ghost story as she navigates the silence of her apartment. Finally, on the top floor, we have the judges: Vittorio (played by Nanni Moretti himself) and Dora (Margherita Buy). Their lives are upended when their son, Andrea (Alessandro Sperduti), kills a woman while driving drunk.

I’ll be honest: the screenplay occasionally has the structural integrity of a wet panettone. It leaps forward five years, then another five, and while that keeps the pace brisk, it sometimes robs the characters of the breathing room they need to process their trauma. It’s a film that demands you keep up, even when the emotional leaps feel like they’re skipping a few vital steps.

The Prestige Mid-Budget Vanished Act

In the current landscape of cinema, Three Floors represents a dying breed: the mid-budget European drama. It’s the kind of film that would have been a staple of art-house theaters in the 90s but struggled to find its footing in the 2021 post-pandemic backlog. It premiered at Cannes to a mixed reception, largely because people expected the "old" Moretti—the one with the biting wit and the deeply personal touch. Instead, this feels more clinical, almost like a sociological experiment.

The production value is undeniably high, thanks to Michele D'Attanasio’s cinematography, which captures a version of Rome that isn’t the postcard-perfect tourist trap we usually see. It’s a city of interiors, shadows, and cold marble. Even the score by Franco Piersanti leans into that sense of impending doom. It’s the kind of movie that makes you want to check your own locks and call your parents, if only to make sure you aren’t harboring the same kind of resentment the characters here are.

Despite its flaws, I found myself drawn into the sheer messiness of it all. There’s no easy "villain" here, just people who are profoundly bad at communicating. Elena Lietti, playing Lucio’s wife Sara, brings a grounded sanity to the film that it desperately needs, acting as the audience's surrogate as she watches her husband descend into a spiral of obsession.

Why This One Slipped Away

So, why haven't you heard of this? Part of it is the timing. Released in the wake of the pandemic, it was dwarfed by the return of blockbuster spectacles. Another part is that it’s a "quiet" film that doesn't lend itself to viral social media clips or heated Twitter discourse. It’s a movie about the long-term consequences of single moments, and in a world of instant takes, that’s a hard sell.

But for those who miss the era of cinema where we just sat and watched families fall apart and put themselves back together, Three Floors is worth the climb. It’s a reminder that even in the most "civilized" settings, we’re all just one bad decision away from the ground floor. It might not be a masterpiece, but it’s a fascinating, flawed look at the architecture of human guilt.

Nanni Moretti's foray into adaptation is a dense, often punishing look at the secrets we keep from our neighbors and ourselves. While the time-skips can be jarring and the drama occasionally veers into soap opera territory, the powerhouse performances by Margherita Buy and Alba Rohrwacher keep the emotional stakes grounded. It’s a film that lingers like a faint stain on a white wall—you might not notice it at first, but once you do, you can't look away.