Edoardo (Emanuele Maria Di Stefano) is a junior at a prestigious catholic school in 1975. Despite being taught to live a life of peace and grace, the boys flirt with violence constantly as they navigate their adolescence, rejecting anyone who is different, and acting on their growing attention to the neighborhood girls. While Edoardo fumbles through his first crush, on the other side of town, at a villa in Cierco, two of Edoardo’s classmates, Angelo (Luca Vergoni) and Gianni (Francesco Cavallo), are holding hostage Donatella (Benedetta Porcaroli) and Rosa (Federica Torchetti) while they repeatedly rape and humiliate the young women until finally dumping their bodies in the trunk of a car to be discovered by the police.   

Directed by Stefano Mordini, The Catholic School is a dramatic retelling and philosophical musing about The Cierco Massacre, a shocking event in Italy’s history that prompted the eventual change of rape being seen as a crime of the society and turning it into a crime of the person. Mordini works off a script cowritten with Massimo Gaudioso and Luca Infascelli, based on the novel detailing the events by Edoardo Albinati. After its premiere at the Venice Film Festival, Netflix picked up the distribution rights for its streaming platform in the United States where this disturbing bit of history can easily find itself on home screens right as children begin a new school year of their own and, not even a month into the new year and in New York City alone reporting a 16% increase in sexually based crimes being reported and already over 30 mass shooting events nation-wide. 

The Catholic School is trying to accomplish a lot in its 106-minute runtime, and it does so by employing a very fractured narrative of which the pieces can largely be separated into two plots: Edoardo and Gianni. When the film follows Edoardo, who also lends the voice-over narration for the film, it opens up some of the more philosophical musings about the violence in young men. It creates an interesting argument, or rather observation, that boys are constantly trying to prove themselves to one another and this demanding cycle starts anew every day. One small misstep and they can find themselves on the other end of the ridicule, yet they are expected to all stick together as a unit when allegations against their behavior arise even though they are all too eager to reject one another at the slightest perceived offense against their masculinity in a perverse and unwritten contract of brotherhood. 

This is conveyed throughout the film’s opening act when Marco (Nicolò Galasso) reports to the headmaster of the school that Gianni and Angelo beat up another boy at school breaking his glasses. Gianni’s father (Riccardo Scamarcio) offers a handsome donation to the school to keep his son and the family name in the good graces of the church before returning home to beat the boy for his insubordination. Edoardo, in his omnipotent narration, explains that it is not the boy’s fault for acting out because the rules and boundaries are not clear; how can the adults expect them to behave without clear delineation? This veiled excuse informs much of the film, and it does not totally seek to absolve Gianni and Angelo of their eventual crimes, but it does not come right out and condemn it, either. 

In retaliation for being tattled on, the boys grab hold of Marco and recreate artwork of Jesus being flogged before the crucifixion with Marco playing the role of Jesus. As the boys begin whipping Marco harder, eventually Gioacchino (Andrea Lintozzi Senneca) intervenes and takes Marco back to his dorm, but not before the gang notices Marco is struggling to hide an erection from the lashings.  It is not the only instance of homosexuality in the film as later, Alessando (Giulio Fochetti), the top student in the class, discovers his father (Gianluca Guidi) is having an affair with one of his male students. The Catholic School does little to comment on this, but it is strange that it has not one but two instances contained in the narrative. 

The final segment of the film is the longest and most coherent act as it does not contain too many time jumps. Until now, the film is showing various moments in the lives of the characters offset by title cards stating how many days, months, or hours the events are away from the crime. It is purposefully disorienting and does not lend itself to making the arc of the film legible to audiences, nor does it seem to serve a major purpose beyond keeping tensions high as a result of general confusion. Whereas in the beginning, the film almost tired to build sympathy towards Gianni and Angelo, that sentiment is mostly gone in this final act. It definitely paints Angelo as a bit more of a monster, and while it is burdened with the fact of the matter, it does not utilize Gianni enough to drive home its thesis. Gianni’s silence and less aggressive attitude does not stop him from assaulting Donatella and Rosa, and there is no crisis of conscience here where it appears he is only doing it to save face with Angelo. If the script is trying to posit this as the end result of boys being boys, it is sloppily done because it never shows any tangible ideation of right and wrong in Gianni’s actions. He willingly participates in this days-long marathon of abuse and violence.  

The Catholic School is a very confounding and confusing piece that gets lost in its own observation. Every character is living out a tragic arc and yet nothing is resolved in the end. So often, that is life, but when it comes to the movies, audiences deserve a conclusion. Its kaleidoscopic construction only serves to confuse, and its messaging is lost in the elaborate structure. Edoardo’s voice-over illuminates a dim pathway to understanding the goals of the film, but it is not enough to boil down the “why” of the crime. Violence is often, at its core, a senseless over-compensation enacted against innocents. Justin Kurtzel examines tragedy in his film, Nitram (2022), and comes to the same conclusion of senselessness. Both films highlight potential catalyst moments that disrupted the lives of these men, but whereas Nitram wholly rebukes the actions of the Port Arthur assailant, The Catholic School still seems to be throwing the life vest to Gianni, as if his meekness – the anthesis to Angelo’s more outward displays of masculinity – should somehow be taken into account because the entire first act presented a case study of boys doing what they “need to do” to fit in with a crowd while the middle act disproves the defense of reacting to trauma. The final title cards that explain what happened to those involved in the Cierco massacre lend credence to a good faith argument that The Catholic School is, despite everything, condemning the crimes, but it is just a shame that the importance of this story gets so lost in its overly complicated execution.