Children Of The Monkey

Hardly any bathing scene can surpass the emotional gravity of the one in Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation – an adult son bathing his elderly father, absent with dementia, while sobbing. In Tommaso Landucci’s first narrative feature, the dynamic is reversed. Dario (Riccardo Scamarcio), a father, bathes Enrico (Andrea Aggio), his teenage son with a disability. There is no sobbing, though Scamarcio’s absent gaze and piercing hazel eyes – accentuated by a deliberately anachronistic aesthetic, a modern-day drama shot on film – hint at a world of shame and sadness.

Employed as a damage assessor, Dario is on the doorstep of a midlife crisis that coincides with his son’s worsening disability. His occupation seems to have become a way of seeing; he filters life through the lens of damage. His brother (Fausto Russo Alesi), who is also his work partner, has an able-bodied son, Giacomo (Tancredi Naldini), around Enrico’s age. Starved of an apprentice to guide through the rites of masculine coming-of-age, Dario offers to teach Giacomo how to ride his old trial motorcycle. In doing so, he begins to trespass on his brother’s paternal prerogative, at the expense of his own son.

The title Children Of The Monkey refers to Aesop’s fable The Monkeys And Their Mother, in which a mother nurtures one of her two young while neglecting the other. In Landucci’s drama, the two young monkeys take the form of a real child and an ideal one. Yet despite the source fable’s maternal focus, the film does little justice to the mothers of its boys, who are at best ornamental, one-dimensional figures.

It is clear that the thirty-something Landucci has an ambitious visual conception, even if his stylistic choices are not always fully justified: a film inspired by a 2,600-year-old fable, shot in a several-decades-old cinematic aesthetic, to capture a modern-day drama in which the care of children, able-bodied or otherwise, is still implicitly relegated to mothers.

Children Of The Monkey does not only examine Dario’s fatherhood. It peripherally explores the dynamic between Giacomo and his father, as well as that between Dario, his brother and their own father (Luigi Diberti). This boys’ club doesn’t offer anything new in the way of insight. Mistakes are made and one should strive not to repeat them with their own children. We knew that already.

When the sorrowful father recognises the boundaries crossed in trying to claim a “perfect” son in his nephew, a neat turn toward absolution arrives, affording Scamarcio’s character considerably more sympathy than he has earned. It was difficult not to think of a real-life counterpoint – a Libya-born American man who, throughout his life, fostered over 80 terminally ill children and children with disabilities. A man who not only wasn’t tempted to want a “perfect” child but sought and loved those the world had cruelly deemed “imperfect”.

Contemporary cinema seems increasingly willing to move away from such extraordinary real-life figures toward fictional, average men – and, with Children Of The Monkey, toward the reassurance that having these thoughts is permissible, so long as one recognises them in time. Ending with Yazoo’s “Only You” – one of cinema’s most overused songs – seals that absolution.

Reviewed on: 07 Sep 2026