40 Secondi
40 Seconds recounts the twenty-four hours preceding the beating that led to the death of Willy Monteiro Duarte, a twenty-one-year-old man. The film does not focus on the fatal act itself but interweaves multiple individual trajectories — friends, acquaintances, and future aggressors — revealing how fragments of everyday life, chance encounters, unspoken tensions, and buried frustrations can converge in a single, “unpredictable” moment of violence.
Through a circular, looping structure, the narrative repeats itself from different perspectives, evoking the cumulative and colliding nature of events. Among these stories, the one that stands out most is that of the twins: their family, their domestic dynamics, the hidden dealings behind their apparent normality, and the investigation that slowly unravels their shadowy business activities. More than an investigative film, 40 Seconds positions itself as a moral inquiry: it shows how a single spark can ignite the void, how the boundary between normality and horror is, more often than not, inextricably intertwined.
Through a circular, looping structure, the narrative repeats itself from different perspectives, evoking the cumulative and colliding nature of events. Among these stories, the one that stands out most is that of the twins: their family, their domestic dynamics, the hidden dealings behind their apparent normality, and the investigation that slowly unravels their shadowy business activities. More than an investigative film, 40 Seconds positions itself as a moral inquiry: it shows how a single spark can ignite the void, how the boundary between normality and horror is, more often than not, inextricably intertwined.
“Violence is the last refuge of the uncapable.”
— Isaac Asimov
— Isaac Asimov
In its attempt to capture the reality of an episode that profoundly marked the public conscience, Vincenzo Alfieri’s 40 Seconds treads a difficult line between civic denunciation and cinematic reconstruction. The film aspires to be a choral narrative, divided into segments that return through a transversal structure, retracing the same hours from different points of view. It is a narrative device that, while not devoid of formal originality, ultimately produces a sense of repetition — as though the obsession with reconstruction prevented any genuine opening toward the unexpected.
Among the various narrative threads, the one devoted to the twins is undoubtedly the most accomplished. Here Alfieri manages to probe more deeply into family dynamics, their domestic ambiguity, and the context of an investigation that gradually exposes the illicit activities concealed behind seemingly respectable enterprises. In this section, the film achieves a rare balance — between chronicle and moral analysis, between verisimilitude and narrative tension. Elsewhere, however, the story disperses into scenes which, though well-intentioned, feel conventional, burdened by the weight of the already-seen.
The depiction of “the night” — the loud music as the inevitable backdrop to excess, drunkenness, quarrels, and drugs (even if not explicitly shown) — feels familiar. These sequences risk becoming mere topoi: the flashing lights, the noise, the rising tension, the anticipated moment when “something happens.” In 40 Seconds, such moments help to build atmosphere but lack originality, resembling crafted set-pieces more than glimpses of lived experience.
The nightclub, the nightmare, youthful rage, crude language, sudden violence — all are rendered with a kind of programmatic clarity, as if the film sought to return the real to its rawest state, yet in doing so merely amplifies its superficiality. What should be a radiography of generational emptiness at times slips into an aesthetic of repetition, where meaninglessness is narrated without genuine disquiet.
The film’s documentary verisimilitude, though motivated by a realist impulse, becomes at times cloying, even irritating. It is, paradoxically, a sensation that mirrors the very reality the film portrays — a heavy, unrefined, obsessively exposed reality in its daily brutality. Alfieri neither softens nor transcends it. He remains trapped on the most epidermic level of social storytelling, as if the urgency to reproduce facts precluded the emergence of a more disturbing or reflective gaze.
Despite its not inconsiderable length (around two hours), the film attempts to weave together many threads — an ambitious and risky choice that at times compromises cohesion. Some scenes feel repetitive, while efforts to build tension are diluted by sequences that fail to truly advance the narrative. Secondary characters often seem sketched, functional, serving more to diffuse than to deepen the drama.
One merit must be acknowledged: 40 Seconds avoids pathos and sentimentalism. It refuses cheap emotion and the manipulation of empathy. Yet, in its search for authenticity, it often slips into its opposite: vulgarity as a dominant idiom, stereotype as a shortcut for meaning. It is an understandable, perhaps inevitable, but not excusable fall. To depict emptiness, violence, ignorance, and contemporary coarseness does not mean to reproduce them; it requires, instead, a gaze capable of transfiguration — of critical distance.
In this sense, 40 Seconds remains a film caught between ethical urgency and aesthetic limitation: a work that seeks to render the chaos of the present but becomes ensnared within it, unable to sublimate it into a truly new form. Its structural originality and meticulous editing are not enough to compensate for the predictability of many images and the implicit rhetoric of a narrative that relies too heavily on realism and too little on vision. Perhaps the real challenge would have been precisely that — to find a refined, or at least consciously sophisticated, way of speaking about the brutality of the world without reproducing its very language.
“Barbarism is not the opposite of civilization; it is its product.”
— Theodor W. Adorno
— Theodor W. Adorno
This movie was in the official competition of Rome Film Fest