Film Inspired by Aesop Fable Sparks Oscar Buzz
TORONTO – This year, all eyes are on Italy’s newly unveiled Oscar shortlist, and one title dominating industry chatter is The Children of the Monkey (I figli della scimmia). While local audiences haven’t had a chance to see it in theaters yet, early buzz has it as a definitive frontrunner to become Italy’s official submission for the 99th Academy Awards. The film left an indelible mark on the recent Venice Film Festival, walking away with prestigious Horizons awards for both Best Screenplay and Best Actor.
Early reviews out of the Lido’s screenings describe the film as a grounded, deeply moving exploration of parental psychology and grief. The story follows Dario, a father buckling under the claustrophobic weight of caring for his young son, Enrico, who has severe cerebral palsy.
When Dario’s athletic teenage nephew comes to stay with them, an effortless bond forms between them. Suddenly, Dario is forced to confront a painful, unspoken internal divide: the overwhelming reality of the child he has versus the idealized, able-bodied child he always wished for.
At the center of this emotional pressure cooker is Riccardo Scamarcio, whose performance is being hailed by festival-goers as a career-defining triumph.
To prepare for the emotionally taxing role of Dario, reports indicate that Scamarcio spent months embedded with real-life families and caregivers navigating cerebral palsy, learning the intense physical and mental routines of daily care. His dedication reportedly translates into a performance stripped of Hollywood sentimentality, capturing the messy reality of caregiver burnout with what critics call devastating honesty.
Word out of the festival is that the narrative backbone of the film draws direct inspiration from an unexpected source: Aesop’s ancient fable, The Monkeys and Their Mother, which tells of a mother monkey who smothers one twin with affection while entirely neglecting the other. Director Tommaso Landucci masterfully twists this ancient lesson on conditional love into a modern metaphor for the quiet taboos of parenting.
As Landucci noted when discussing the psychological core of the story, “We wanted to explore the unconfessable shadows of parenthood – the guilt of desiring a different reality and the tragic human tendency to love the illusion of what could have been over the beautiful fragility of what is”.
Beyond the script, early reviews highlight a masterclass in visual storytelling. The film was shot almost entirely inside a brutalist, concrete villa nestled in the remote hills of Tuscany, with an architecture intentionally selected to mirror a high-end cage, visually reinforcing the characters’ psychological entrapment.
By tackling such a taboo subject with grace and unflinching realism, The Children of the Monkey sounds like proof that the most powerful stories aren’t about spectacles, but the quiet, agonizing choices made behind closed doors.
Images courtesy of Lebowski, Lungta Film & Mosaicon Film
Massimo Volpe is a filmmaker and freelance writer from Toronto: he writes reviews of Italian films/content on Netflix
