Strangeness

If you’ve ever felt like your brain was a crowded waiting room filled with people you haven’t invited yet, you might have more in common with a Nobel Prize-winning playwright than you think. In the opening moments of Roberto Andò’s Strangeness (La stranezza), we find Luigi Pirandello—played with a weary, granite-faced elegance by Toni Servillo—suffering from a severe case of the "ghosts." He’s haunted by characters who haven't been written yet, all clamoring for his attention while he tries to navigate a trip back to his Sicilian roots in 1920. It’s a gorgeous, witty, and surprisingly grounded look at where "great art" actually comes from, and spoiler alert: it’s usually from the messy, unintended comedy of real life.

I stumbled upon this film on a Tuesday night while my cat was unsuccessfully trying to hunt a very large spider behind my television, and honestly, the frantic energy in my living room was a perfect companion to the "strangeness" unfolding on screen.

The Graveyard of Ideas

The setup is a delight. Pirandello is back in Girgenti for the 80th birthday of fellow writer Giovanni Verga, but a chance encounter leads him to a pair of local gravediggers, Nofrio (Salvatore Ficarra) and Bastiano (Valentino Picone). These two aren't just burying the dead; they’re moonlight dramatists, obsessively rehearsing a tragicomedy with a local amateur troupe. Ficarra and Picone are a legendary comedy duo in Italy, but here, Andò uses their natural chemistry to create something far more soulful.

Watching Pirandello observe these two is like watching a master chef get inspired by a street-side taco stand. He’s fascinated by their bickering, their passion, and the unintentional chaos of their production. While Pirandello is stuck in the high-minded clouds of intellectual paralysis, Nofrio and Bastiano are down in the dirt, dealing with actors who forget their lines and a local audience that can’t distinguish between the play and a neighborhood brawl. Watching this makes most modern 'meta' movies look like they’re trying way too hard. It’s a period piece that feels remarkably fresh because it treats the "struggling artist" trope with a wink and a nudge rather than a heavy-handed sermon.

A Lesson in Subtle Chaos

The film’s secret weapon is undoubtedly Toni Servillo. If you know him from The Great Beauty or Il Divo, you know he has a face that can communicate an entire geopolitical crisis with a single twitch of his eyebrow. Here, he plays Pirandello as a man possessed by an internal itch he can’t scratch. There’s a specific scene during a performance of the gravediggers' play where the audience begins to revolt, and the look on Servillo’s face—a mixture of horror, enlightenment, and glee—is worth the price of admission alone.

It’s in these moments that Strangeness engages with our contemporary obsession with the "creative process." In an era where we are inundated with "making-of" documentaries and behind-the-scenes social media feeds, Strangeness reminds us that the best inspiration is often found when we stop looking for it. The film captures the transition from the theatrical traditions of the 19th century to the fragmented, self-aware modernism that Pirandello eventually pioneered with Six Characters in Search of an Author.

Actually, a bit of fun trivia: when this was released in Italy in 2022, it became a massive box-office hit, outperforming several Hollywood blockbusters including Black Adam. There is something deeply heartening about a literate, quiet film about a 1920s playwright beating a superhero movie at the turnstiles. It suggests that even in our franchise-saturated landscape, audiences still have a hunger for stories that respect their intelligence and their sense of humor.

When Art Meets the Audience

The cinematography by Maurizio Calvesi (who worked on The Veiled Woman) is stunning without being "postcard-pretty." Sicily looks lived-in, dusty, and slightly eerie, matching the film's title. The lighting in the theater scenes, specifically, captures that flickering, uncertain energy of early 20th-century performance—a world where the line between the stage and the street was razor-thin.

If there’s a flaw, it’s that the film occasionally leans a bit too heavily into its own cleverness during the final act, when it bridges the gap between the Sicilian village and the famous premiere of Six Characters in Rome. But even then, the performances carry it through. Giulia Andò and Donatella Finocchiaro provide essential grounding as the women in these men’s lives, reminding us that while the men are busy "creating," the women are usually the ones keeping the world from falling apart.

For those of us watching in the streaming era, Strangeness is one of those rare finds that makes you want to turn off your phone and actually pay attention. It’s a drama that isn’t afraid to be funny, and a comedy that isn’t afraid to be ghostly. It’s a reminder that the most "contemporary" thing an artist can do is admit they don't have all the answers.

The film concludes with a sequence that beautifully ties the amateur theatricals of Sicily to the high-stakes drama of the Roman stage. It’s a satisfying loop that doesn't just explain Pirandello’s genius but humanizes it. By the time the credits rolled, I felt like I had been part of a secret conversation between the past and the present. It’s a quiet triumph of a film, proving that the most interesting thing about a masterpiece isn’t the finished product, but the beautiful, messy "strangeness" that breathed life into it in the first place.