No one in recent years has staged the machinations of the Mafia on the big screen as visually powerful and abysmal as Stefano Sollima in “Suburra”. Now the gangster highlight is available for free on Amazon Freevee.
It is not uncommon for Italian cinema in particular to deal with the cosmos of the Mafia time and again, after all, the criminal structures of organised crime permeate numerous areas of the country. Unlike the romanticising masterpiece “The Godfather”, for example, the more modern mafia films from Italy are characterised by a nihilistic and probably far more realistic inventory of a dangerous web of violence, corruption and abuse of power.
This was already the case in 2008 with the celebrated “Gomorrah – Journey into the Realm of the Camorra” – and is also the case with “Suburra”, which was released seven years later and is similarly based, like “Gomorrah”, on a meticulously researched book. And it is precisely “Suburra” that you can now watch without a streaming subscription and completely free of charge – albeit with short commercial interruptions – on Amazon Freevee, the free alternative to Prime Video.
WHAT “SUBURRA” IS ABOUT
Regularly, high-ranking politician Filippo Malgradi (Pierfranesco Favino) pleasures himself with prostitutes and drugs in a hotel. However, when one of the young women dies during one of these revelries, events are set in motion that soon shake all of Rome.
Malgradi hires his favourite prostitute Sabrina (Giulia Gorietti) to cover up the incident. She enlists the help of a criminal friend, Spadino (Giacomo Ferrara), who then blackmails the deputy. He in turn wants to have Spadino eliminated by a gangster boss, which finally triggers a devastating gang war in the Roman underworld. The powerful godfather of the Italian capital (Claudio Amendola) tries to smooth the waters in the smouldering conflict. But it may already be too late for that…
POWERFUL GANGSTER EPIC
Suburra
In this Italian mafia ballad, author Stefano Sollima illuminates how organised crime in Rome reaches its fingers into the Vatican and exerts influence at all levels.StreamingTipOfTheDay
Available on Prime (Freevee) pic.twitter.com/dAbp6o2bvH
– FILMTOAST (@FilmtoastDE) January 12, 2023
“Suburra” was directed by Stefano Sollima, who also played a decisive role in shaping an equally abysmal Mafia story as director of the effusively celebrated TV version of “Gomorrah” (currently among the 150 best series of all time on IMDb) and is otherwise known for strongly illustrated action dramas such as “Sicario 2” and “A.C.A.B. – All Cops Are Bastards”.
In “Suburra”, too, Sollima relies on a partly cinematically exaggerated aesthetic that does not at all glorify the supposed advantages of Mafia life, but rather exposes them as a beautiful pretence and dissects the moral depravity with – in the most positive sense – unpleasant ruthlessness. We therefore gave this thoroughly impressive gangster epic a fully deserved 4 out of 5 stars:
NETFLIX-PREQUEL
Those who enjoy “Suburra” and want to delve even deeper into the subject matter can, by the way, not only turn to the factual novel by journalist Carlo Bonini and judge Giancarlo de Cataldo, but also to Netflix. Three seasons of a “Suburra” series were produced for the streaming service between 2017 and 2020, which takes place some time before the plot of the novel and the film and can definitely compete with the film version of the material in terms of intensity.
