Quartile rating: 6/10 · 1 rating
Three well-off young men—former students at Rome’s prestigious all-boys Catholic high school San Leone Magno—brutally tortured, raped, and murdered two young women in 1975. The event, which came to be known as the Circeo massacre, shocked and captivated the country, exposing the violence and dark underbelly of the upper middle class at a moment when the traditional structures of family and religion were seen as under threat.
The Catholic School reconstructs the 1975 Circeo massacre with a sprawling, episodic approach drawn from Edoardo Albinati's prize-winning novel. The film attempts to dissect the moral rot of Rome's bourgeois Catholic milieu but struggles under its own ambition — the narrative is diffuse, juggling too many characters and tangents without cohering into a sharp dramatic thrust. Acting is competent across the board but rarely distinguished, with no single performance rising above solid ensemble work. Cinematography is serviceable and period-appropriate without being visually inventive. The subject matter — institutional complicity, class privilege, and gendered violence — has been explored more incisively elsewhere, and the film's sprawling structure dilutes rather than deepens its provocations. The ending, depicting the brutal crime itself, arrives with shocking frankness but feels narratively unsatisfying given the long buildup, leaving the thematic argument incomplete rather than resonant.