This psychodramatic thriller-of-sorts from co-writer/director Daniele Luchetti (adapting Domenico Starnone’s 2019 novel) is often intense and unsettling, although the epic running time (136 minutes) and too many endings do hurt it slightly.
Getting-on teacher and writer Pietro (Elio Germano) is soon to receive a presidential award, and early sequences suggest that he’s deeply uncomfortable with all this retrospection. We then flash back to somewhere in the 1980s when he was working at a somewhat grungy school in Rome, and one of his best students was Teresa (Federica Rosellini, who looks like a European Ally Sheedy when she smiles).
After Teresa graduates, he later finds that she’s working as a waitress instead of attending university, and when he tracks her down, a sexual relationship naturally commences. Teresa grows more passionate and unpredictable, and Pietro often doesn’t know what to do with her, and when they reveal their darkest secrets to each other, she leaves without explanation, a plot twist that’s been much betrayed.
However, despite Teresa’s at times freaky behaviour (and Rosellini’s scary stare), Luchetti’s film does miss her in the second hour, especially when Pietro becomes involved with Nadia (Vittoria Puccini), a woman he can more easily manipulate. Or can he?
With strong performances from Germano and Rosellini (in the showier role), it must be said that this does suffer from the fact that the pair of them are so unlikeable: his Pietro can be spineless and cruel, while her Teresa has a creepy, taunting edge. But does he deserve to be treated this way? Much has been made of the fact that this is a movie about secrets, and that Pietro obviously has a doozy, but do we ever find out what it actually is? Well…
Radiohead’s Thom Yorke also composed this one’s score, and this does help increase the tension when things get a little too wobbly at the edges, with intermittent screeching strings reminiscent of Bernard Herrmann’s music for some of Alfred Hitchcock’s classics.
But is this, in fact, a kind of modern Italian Psycho variation? Or is it, as Pietro himself might have said, merely a saga of Amore/Love and Paura/Fear?
Trust is screening as part of the St. Ali Italian Film Festival 2024.
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