The Big Picture

Sarr shines in the lead role, displaying impressive emotional depth.
Brief fantasy sequences showcase the film’s visual creativity.
An overstuffed narrative and generic filmmaking undermine the impact of the misery portrayed.

At the start of Io Capitano, Senegalese teenagers Seydou (Seydou Sarr) and Moussa (Moustapha Fall) are told by a more experienced adult named Sisko that their dreams of going to Europe are not as foolproof as they think. Sisko tells the pair that traveling to Europe is deeply dangerous and, even when one arrives there, poverty and arduous hardships still exist. “It’s not like it is on television,” Sisko somberly remarks. The beckoning siren call of new opportunities and financial independence, however, leads Seydou and Moussa to take the risk. They’re leaving home behind for new terrain.

Their journey takes them across a scalding desert, encounters with vicious criminals who sell any immigrant travelers into slavery, and other unspeakable atrocities. Writer/director Matteo Garrone (who penned the screenplay alongside Massimo Gaudioso, Massimo Ceccherini, and Andrea Tagliaferri) is unblinking in his depiction of young souls encountering horrors they should never have to even contemplate, let alone experience. Committing to all that anguish leads to some evocative sequences, though Io Capitano (which scored an Oscar nomination for Italy for Best International Feature at the 96th Academy Awards) is ultimately a hallow rather than an emotionally overwhelming cinematic experience.

‘Io Capitano’ Excels With Its Young Lead Performers

If there’s any major reason Io Capitano is worth seeing, it’s for the work of Seydou Sarr in the film’s lead role. With only one other prior acting credit to his name, Sarr anchors the entire film with conviction. He’s especially adept at portraying the interior life of Seydou in subtle terms, a pivotal quality for this performance given that the character spends so much of Io Capitano being forcibly silenced. Within this character’s eyes or the tiniest changes in his facial expressions, Sarr communicates Seydou’s unyielding compassion for Moussa and other human beings. This world keeps trying to break this teenager down, but Sarr finds fascinatingly intimate ways of communicating this character’s greatest qualities enduring anyway.

Io Capitano’s screenplay, meanwhile, fares best whenever it subtly leans on how much capitalistic impulses define the inhumane misery that Seydou, Moussa, and other immigrants go through, A gun-wielding border guard is happy to let the teenage protagonists pass if he gets $50, for example, while a bunch of organized criminals demand $800 from each of the immigrants they’ve captured. Io Capitano reflects a world much like reality, where human beings see other humans as only means for financial gain. A third-act appearance of massive oil rigs plunging their tendrils into the ocean only reinforces how rampant these toxic capitalistic forces are. As these rigs pollute the water in the name of making oil executives rich, audiences see the same money-oriented forces that informed Seydou and Moussa’s suffering on a larger scale. Capitalism isn’t just confined to random mafia members with guns, it’s everywhere.

Escape from those forces only exists in a handful of fantasy sequences peppered throughout Io Capitano, which provide a drastic departure from the starkly realistic visual aesthetic of the rest of the movie. Such sequences see Seydou encountering figures like a dying immigrant woman or a mysterious feather-bound humanoid figure that is able to fly far above the desert ground. Suddenly, Seydou no longer needs to trudge through miserable landscapes, he can just float above a world that suffocates him. Journalist Juliet Clark once remarked that the visual motif of kids jumping from one roof to another in Charlie Burnett’s Killer of Sheep encapsulated how these youngsters “achieve a mobility that eludes their elders.” A similar idea appears to inform these visuals in Io Capitano, which see Seydou and other figures in the film finally realizing a level of freedom impossible in reality.

Related This Is the First Foreign Language Performance To Win an Oscar Foreign language performances made significant strides with this Sophia Loren performance, though not every country got an equal boost.

‘Io Capitano’ Gets Bogged Down in Generic Misery
Image via Cohen Media Group

Unfortunately, Io Capitano’s brief fantasy sequences involving flying figures stand out so much because the rest of the movie is very rudimentary on a visual level. Garrone and cinematographer Paolo Carnera frame the saga of Seydou in a disappointingly paint-by-numbers fashion, with few images in the runtime of Io Capitano really standing out in terms of blocking and framing. Most frustratingly, the images that dominate the runtime are disappointingly standard in terms of communicating the suffering of human beings in cinematic terms. Unnamed Black bodies are tortured excruciatingly on-screen while similarly unnamed Black women are only framed undergoing unspeakable pain in fleeting shots to motivate male protagonists.

These visual norms are all too common in other movies and tend to (intentionally or not) suggest that the only time Black lives are important enough to be shot on camera is when they’re screaming in agony. Beyond just this unnerving subtext, adhering to such derivative visual norms means that Io Capitano struggles to create imagery that gives the entire film a specific identity. That’s an issue that, unfortunately, encapsulates how middle-of-the-road most of this movie is. Andrea Farri’s score is similarly serviceable but ultimately forgettable while supporting actors rarely get to stick around long enough on-screen to leave an impression on the viewer.

That particular flaw reflects the most critical issue of Io Capitano: its overstuffed nature. In trying to capture an expansive journey of one immigrant traveling from Senegal to Italy, Garrone has to cram a lot of harrowing material into just 121 minutes of screentime. The result is a film where the most devastating developments are introduced and then disposed of rather quickly. Seydou’s time as a laborer for a rich man, for instance, is confined almost exclusively to one montage. This doesn’t give audiences time to explore Seydou’s feelings about this situation or really feel the impact of being forced into this occupation. Compare this storytelling approach to a prime piece of bleak cinema like 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, which encloses its plot over just one night. That limited timeframe affords the devastating atmosphere room to breathe and plenty of time to quietly understand the human beings on-screen.

The more rushed narrative of Io Capitano, meanwhile, unfurls a barrage of anguish at the viewer without giving the audience time to soak in the turmoil or appreciate how it’s impacting the lead characters. Executing that kind of story with a functional but ultimately generic filmmaking style just makes Io Capitano feel like even more of a wasted opportunity. At least Seydou Sarr delivers the level of emotional insight in his restrained lead performance that the rest of Io Capitano often leaves on the table.

Io Capitano REVIEWIo Capitano fails its stirring lead performance with generic filmmaking and storytelling impulsesProsSeydou Sarr excels in the lead role.A handful of fantasy sequences show some visual imagination. ConsAn overstuffed narrative never lets the barrage of misery be impactful.A generic approach to framing human anguish undercuts the impact of Io Capitano.The cinematography and score are ultimately competent but forgettable.

Io Capitano is now in select theaters in the U.S. Click below for showtimes.

GET TICKETS