Mafia movies don’t get any darker or more despairing than “Black Souls,” a powerfully magnetic Italian drama about three brothers who grew up on a goat farm, each choosing a different stance vis-a-vis the family business, which, by the way, ain’t raising goats. (The fact that their “shepherd” father was murdered on the way to town tells you that).
The Carbones are a motley trio: cocky Luigi (Marco Leonardi), the capo of the family’s Milan-based drug gang; fussy, bespectacled Rocco (Peppino Mazzotta), who keeps the books; and Luciano (Fabrizio Ferracane), who, well, actually still does raise goats in the sleepy village where he and his more wayward brothers were raised. Luciano’s teenage son, Leo (Giuseppe Fumo), idolizes his uncle Luigi’s thug lifestyle, which is a source of much sorrow and pain for the father. This cannot end well, can it?
Director Francesco Munzi (“The Rest of the Night”) wrote the screenplay with Maurizio Braucci and Fabrizio Ruggirello, based on Gioacchino Criaco’s 2008 novel, and “Black Souls” begins uneventfully enough. An early scene depicts a drug deal being negotiated with as much tension as, say, the sale of a used car. It’s business as usual for the Carbones, and business is booming.
But the tensions simmering just below the surface slowly reveal themselves in Munzi’s methodical, meticulous storytelling, which only gradually points to the fault lines in a landscape that seems so initially placid. Most of the cracks have to do with teenage Leo, a loose cannon whose midnight shooting up of a village cafe precipitates a mess that culminates in a murder, jeopardizing the fragile truce between the Carbones and two other crime families.
