![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/91b7aa87a1ecda0418bdc2a962b6a261a7-mussolini-mubi.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n The director jams as many moving parts, camera tricks, and maximalist flourishes he can fit into his portrait of Italy\u2019s descent into fascism. It\u2019s appropriately mesmerizing.
\n Photo: MUBI\n <\/p>\n
Spoilers follow for Italian history and the series Mussolini: Son of the Century through \u201cChapter 5,\u201d which premiered on MUBI on Wednesday, October 1.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Give Joe Wright<\/a> the opportunity to do whatever he wants, and he will do whatever he wants, like set his adaptation of Anna Karenina primarily in a rundown theater or have Blackbeard\u2019s pirates sing Nirvana\u2019s \u201cSmells Like Teen Spirit\u201d in Pan. Wright\u2019s tendency as a director to point out the artifice of what he\u2019s doing, then use our awareness of said artifice to emphasize how all of us, all the time, are performing for an audience, is a perfect fit for a story about politics and the people who wield ideologies as lure and cudgel. In Mussolini: Son of the Century, Wright has created a deliriously experimental series about a monstrous figure, jamming as many moving parts, camera tricks, and maximalist flourishes he can fit into the frame to demonstrate how the Italian dictator was such a magnetic, destructive force.<\/p>\n Mussolini is based on the 2018 novel of the same name by Italian author Antonio Scurati, the first in a five-part series about Benito Mussolini\u2019s rise to power and two-decade reign. (The final book in Scurati\u2019s pentalogy came out in April.) Wright\u2019s adaptation covers the first book only, its eight episodes spanning 1914 to 1925, the years in which Mussolini struck out as a career socialist and pivoted to fascism. The latter was a failing movement at first, too, which the series emphasizes by speeding through a primer on Italian post\u2013World War I history: Veterans of the war felt rejected by society, Italy\u2019s king was ineffectual, and the gap was widening between the rich and military classes and the country\u2019s farmers and peasants. In that gulf Mussolini saw an opportunity, which the series delivers in the premiere via its first bravura sequence of the man \u2014 Luca Marinelli, unrecognizable with a bald spot, paunch, and always-uncomfortable-looking posture \u2014 narrating directly to camera, \u201cThis is my time.\u201d<\/p>\n As Mussolini walks toward the lens, pontificating and maintaining eye contact, Wright whips the camera around to show him assessing himself in a mirror before entering a room where veterans in uniform and draped with munitions cheer him on. These men were \u201cbrave soldiers \u2026 promised compensation, rewards\u201d and \u201cgot nothing\u201d except contempt from people who never wanted Italy in the conflict in the first place. Mussolini understands that their displacement (and ease with violence) allows him to present himself as a savior if they join the fascist cause. Through jingoistic language and a backslapping presence, Mussolini disguises himself as a man of the people, and their cries and applause harmonize with his bold claims about \u201cMy lost people, in need of strongmen and simple ideas \u2026 I will make the revolution with them!\u201d<\/p>\n The room is shadowy but lively, with the sense that there are things going on in every speck of the frame. Mussolini stomps and swirls around, the camera keeping him and his increasingly frenzied supporters in sight. The sequence comes into focus as Mussolini ends up behind a projector and spins a film reel \u2014 and we jump into what\u2019s being projected, which is the speech we just saw him deliver. Fascism is the only thing that will save \u201cthe fatherland,\u201d he proclaims, his message repeating in the room to give the spectators a double dose of what they want to hear. (Note the echoes of ICE\u2019s current \u201cDefend the homeland\u201d slogan.) It\u2019s an Ouroboros of a scene, emphasizing Mussolini watching himself make history to communicate how he recruited Italians to his cause and ensured the rising tide of fascism centered on his image.<\/p>\n Wright plays with that tension constantly, delivering rhythmic montages and complicated choreography to amplify how Mussolini pulled strings as he saw them \u2014 convincing the country\u2019s rich and poor alike that he\u2019s on their side or lambasting the king in one breath and sweet-talking him in the next. A sinewy electronic score from Tom Rowlands of the Chemical Brothers accompanies one of the series\u2019 first instances of horrific violence, a fascist raid on a socialist newspaper as cops stand by. Strobe lights, spinning grenades, and spurting blood accompany the unts-unts-unts.<\/p>\n All of this muchness, in both form and content, adds to the series\u2019s sense of timeliness. No political promise is too ludicrous if it convinces society\u2019s fringes to throw their weight behind a candidate (ahem), and no violence against dissenters too brutal once it becomes normalized (ahem, ahem). Mussolini, Wright explains, was a rapist and womanizer obsessed with other men\u2019s dick sizes and disinterested in his children, but he understood that the way to rule, at least for a while, was to never ask for permission but simply push the line of acceptability until there\u2019s no path back to what once was. The bored little shrug Mussolini gives as he says, in a resigned deadpan, that \u201cYou have to violate what is inviolable \u2026 a crossed boundary is no longer a boundary,\u201d is one of Marinelli\u2019s finest physical moments, conveying the casualness with which the dictator threw off standards of decency. Marinelli is intensely, unsettlingly charismatic, so much so that you marvel at his performance while hating basically every single thing his Mussolini says and does.<\/p>\n The series wants us to judge both the man spewing all this nonsense and the people, including his paramilitary Blackshirts, lapping it up \u2014 to consider why fear and cruelty so profoundly motivate in ways nothing else can. This feverish approach boils over in the final ten minutes of \u201cChapter 5,\u201d which capture exactly how Mussolini\u2019s breaking of the fourth wall and flaunted anachronisms underscore the grotesquerie of Il Duce\u2019s beliefs and methods. The episode begins once Mussolini has been named prime minister after the fascists\u2019 successful March on Rome<\/a> in October 1922. As he reads from French, British, and American newspapers and official communiques praising him, Wright incorporates clips of soldiers and Blackshirts executing citizens and amps up the sound of the crowds chanting \u201cDuce!\u201d outside his offic. In previous episodes we\u2019ve seen Mussolini batter and berate his wife, Rachele (Benedetta Cimatti); his mistress, Margherita (Barbara Chichiarelli); and his secretary, Bianca (Cosima Centurioni), and the opening minutes of the episode introduce Ida Dalser (Jessica Piccolo Valerani) \u2014 his first wife, whom he abandoned years before. She ambushes him to ask for support for their unacknowledged son, Benito Albino Mussolini, but fades into the background as Mussolini enacts his plans for Italy. He installs his loyalists in various ministry positions, takes over Parliament, formalizes a militia that is a \u201cpersonal army financed by the state, that answers only to me,\u201d recruits the Catholics with promises to put religion back in schools, and finally, delivers a speech to Parliament about how no one actually wants freedom.<\/p>\n Wright\u2019s presentation of that anti-freedom speech is Mussolini at its wildest. Once again, numerous things are happening at once: As Mussolini stands to address Parliament, now fully on his side except for a few dozen socialists, Elvis Presley\u2019s \u201cCan\u2019t Help Falling in Love\u201d drops in. Mussolini spreads his arms wide as he asks, \u201cDoes freedom really exist? There are liberties, but freedom itself never existed,\u201d and the camera cuts to his men breaking into Ida\u2019s house and dragging her into an asylum. While Mussolini tells Parliament he\u2019s not \u201csome despot,\u201d and Elvis warbles \u201cTake my hand \/ Take my whole life, too,\u201d we cut to doctors injecting Ida with a sedative and dragging her prone body behind cell doors that slam shut. Wright cuts back and forth frantically, exacerbating the sense that we\u2019re watching something ungodly here, something so baseline evil that it can never be corrected.<\/p>\n