Venice Film Festival 2025: Review of tv series The Monster of Florence

Francesco Vinti (Giacomo Fadda), Stefano Mele (Marco Bullitta), Giovanni Mele (Antonio Tintis). All separate names, yet united by some of Italy's most voyeuristic crimes: they are the ones connected to the murders of the Monster of Florence, chronicled in the series "The Monster," directed by Stefano Sollima. 

In 1968, the first is the lover of Stefano Mele's wife, Barbara (Francesca Olia), a man subjugated by his roots: Mele – through sheer passivity – allowed his wife to be with Vinti and his brother. Mele would bring breakfast to Vinti and his wife each morning as they slept in his bedroom. When Vinti becomes jealous of the woman's new relationship, he convinces Mele to murder her and her new lover: while Barbara is making love in the Florentine countryside with her lover – with their young son asleep in the back seat – he kills them with a barrage of bullets, then hands the gun to Mele so he can take the blame for the murder. Mele accepts, because otherwise Vinti would kill his son. 

Years pass, and Mele serves his sentence: upon release from prison, it becomes clear he cannot be the Monster of Florence, as another couple has been murdered in a car. The detective (Liliana Bottone) struggles to piece together the puzzle, shattered by lies. Especially now that Stefano Mele accuses Vinti of forcing him to lie, and his brother Giovanni is under investigation: the man, while taking a woman out to dinner, leads her to the scene of the Monster's crimes, describing in meticulous detail how the murders took place. Sollima leads us with painstaking precision through the various phases of the eight murders committed between 1968 and 1985. 

What emerges is an atavistic Italy, bound to almost ancestral traditions: when Stefano Mele married Barbara, his father wanted to abuse her because "these are the family rules." While Barbara aspired to freedom, her mother-in-law forced her to stay at home. In the first episodes, the various facets of the case emerge with vehemence, a case that remained complex even after Pietro Pacciani's conviction: he himself was acquitted in the second degree of judgment. Responsibility was established only for the first murder in 1968, while the subsequent killings between 1974 and 1985 remained without conclusion, despite the trials against Pietro Pacciani, Mario Vanni, and Giancarlo Lotti. A series seemingly unresolved but actually complex to fit into place: just like the crimes themselves, which marked a new phenomenon, different from past crimes, where seriality was not so pronounced and the modus operandi not so intricate.