Venice has always known something about beautiful surfaces and dark waters, about the things we choose to admire and the things we prefer not to see beneath them; perhaps that is why Tommaso Landucci’s Children of the Monkey (I Figli della Scimmia), feels so perfectly at home on the Lido, arriving in the Orizzonti selection like a quiet disturbance, a family drama dressed in the language of tenderness but carrying something much more dangerous underneath.

Watching it in Venice, with the evening beginning to settle over the lagoon and the machinery of the festival still buzzing outside, there is an almost physical sensation that Landucci (Best Screenplay winner in the Orizzonti Section) is asking us to look at one of the oldest cinematic subjects: love between parents and children; and see how frightening it can become when love is mixed with expectation.

At the centre of the film is Dario, played by Riccardo Scamarcio (Best Actor in the Orizzonti Section) with a bruised, magnetic restraint, a father whose world has been shaped around his disabled son Enrico, a child he loves fiercely and protects instinctively, until the arrival of his teenage nephew Giacomo opens a door inside him that he would perhaps rather keep locked. Giacomo represents movement, speed, recklessness, motorcycles, the uncomplicated physicality of a boy growing into a man, and around him Dario begins to glimpse another possible version of fatherhood, one built around experiences he cannot share with his own son. There is no easy villainy in this desire, and that is precisely what makes it so uncomfortable.

Landucci does not ask us to condemn Dario, but to recognize the terrible human impulse behind his behaviour: the temptation to love not only the child standing in front of us, but the child we imagined before we ever met them; the film’s title reaches back to Aesop and the story of the mother monkey who favours one offspring over another, but Landucci turns that ancient fable into something deeply contemporary, almost unbearably intimate, transforming the idea of preference into a meditation on parenthood, disability, masculinity and the fantasies we project onto the people we love.

Scamarcio has described the film in Venice as something that ultimately reaches beyond disability and into the much wider territory of fatherhood, and his performance understands exactly where that territory becomes dangerous: Dario is not a monster, he is a man slowly discovering that good intentions do not make every desire innocent; there is something wonderfully old-fashioned about the film’s emotional architecture, but its gaze is anything but nostalgic, because Landucci is interested in the private contradictions that polite families rarely confess aloud; one child becomes the embodiment of vulnerability and responsibility, another the embodiment of freedom, and the father caught between them begins to confuse the two; the motorcycles become more than objects of adolescent rebellion: they are the seductive machinery of another life, the possibility of speed without consequence, of a body that can move through the world without being constantly reminded of its fragility; and yet, like everything seductive in cinema, that freedom comes with a price.

Landucci’s great strength is that he never announces the moment when affection begins to turn into projection; it happens almost invisibly, through looks, silences, gestures, the accumulated weight of things that Dario cannot say; his background in documentary filmmaking is felt in the way he allows these details to breathe, refusing to over-explain emotions that are far more powerful when left hovering between the characters. The filmmaker has spoken about the importance of allowing reality to surprise him, and that philosophy seems embedded in the film’s texture, particularly in the relationship between Scamarcio and Andrea Aggio, whose presence gives the story a startling sense of spontaneity; their connection does not feel manufactured for the camera so much as discovered by it, and that quality becomes increasingly precious as the film moves toward its darker emotional territory.

Fausto Russo Alesi, meanwhile, brings a different kind of gravity as Roberto, reminding us that Dario’s crisis is also part of a larger family ecosystem in which fathers inevitably measure themselves against other fathers, often without admitting that they are doing so; this is where Children of the Monkey becomes more than a story about one troubled man: it becomes a film about comparison, about the poisonous little arithmetic of parenthood, about the ways we look at another family and imagine that their version of happiness might have been easier, cleaner, more complete.

Venice is full of such illusions, of course: faces illuminated by flashbulbs, gowns disappearing into black cars, the fantasy of perfection constantly being constructed and photographed; and against that backdrop Landucci’s film feels almost rebellious in its refusal to make family life beautiful simply because it is supposed to be beautiful; his family is messy, frightened, loving, jealous, protective and occasionally cruel, sometimes all within the same scene; there are no saints here because sainthood would be too easy, and no monsters because monsters would allow us to leave the cinema feeling safely different from the people on screen; instead, Landucci gives us something more troubling: recognition; perhaps the most devastating idea in the film is that parents can love their children completely and still wish, somewhere in the most secret corner of themselves, that they were different; admitting that does not make someone evil; it makes them human, and that humanity is precisely where the film refuses to look away.

Riccardo Scamarcio plays Dario as a man who seems permanently on the verge of saying something he cannot find the courage to articulate, and there is an almost physical tension in that restraint, a sense that every gesture toward Giacomo carries another gesture away from Enrico. It is an extraordinary performance because it never begs for sympathy; instead, it lets sympathy and discomfort occupy the same space.

Landucci understands that the most devastating family tragedies rarely arrive with the sound of thunder; they arrive quietly, in a bedroom, on a road, beside a motorcycle, during an ordinary conversation that suddenly acquires a meaning nobody can take back; even the film’s tenderness therefore feels dangerous, because tenderness is never neutral here; it can heal, but it can also possess; it can protect, but it can also suffocate; it can tell a child “I love you” while secretly meaning “I need you to become the person I need you to be”.

That contradiction gives Children of the Monkey its particular sting and makes it linger long after the screen goes dark; walking out into the Venetian night, the film seems to change shape in your memory, becoming less a story about a particular family and more a question addressed directly to anyone who has ever loved another person enough to imagine their future for them: where does protection end and control begin? At what point does a parent stop seeing a child and start seeing a reflection of themselves? And can love survive the moment when that reflection disappears?

Landucci does not offer the comfort of an answer; he leaves us instead with the more cinematic, more haunting possibility that perhaps loving someone means accepting that they will always remain partly foreign to us, even when we brought them into the world; and maybe that is the film’s most beautiful cruelty.

Children of the Monkey does not ask us to choose the child who deserves more love, but to confront the impossible demand of loving without comparison, without projection, without trying to turn another human being into the missing piece of our own life.

Beneath the Venice lights, with the lagoon reflecting the city in broken fragments, it feels like exactly the kind of story cinema should tell: intimate enough to hurt, uncomfortable enough to stay with you, and open enough to make you wonder whether the people we love most are sometimes the ones we find hardest to truly see.