Vague Visages’ Io Capitano review contains minor spoilers. Matteo Garrone’s 2023 movie features Seydou Sarr, Moustapha Fall and Issaka Sawadogo. Check out the VV home page for more film reviews, along with cast/character summaries, streaming guides and complete soundtrack song listings.

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When humanitarian issues make their way to the forefront of political debate, they tend to go through a process of abstraction; deliberately cold or dehumanizing language is deployed by politicians eager for voters to forget that living, breathing human beings will be affected by their decisions. This is especially true in Europe, where right-wing policies making it harder for those from the Middle East or Africa to immigrate has led thousands to risk their lives to get to the continent, almost all at the mercy of human traffickers, who only care about taking their money — not helping them arrive safely in a new life. Thousands have drowned on these passages due to overcrowding on the small boats used in the final parts of the journey, but even this factor has become a victim to a politicized dehumanization in the way it is frequently reported. There’s a fixation on “stopping the boats,” and without a single second of consideration for building a safer system that doesn’t put vulnerable people at the mercy of criminal gangs.

Matteo Garrone’s latest film, Io Capitano, is very purposefully detached from the political debate surrounding the immigration issue, unwaveringly focused on the first-hand experiences of two teenage boys who decide to leave their native Senegal to start a new life in Italy. The director is no stranger to marrying traditional tales of the criminal underworld with a magical realist whimsy uncharacteristic for the genre, and approaching such harrowing subject matter from a youthful, naïve perspective proves an inspired decision. The ways in which the boys are taken advantage of throughout an arduous journey, which spans an entire continent and several months, is punishing — although, crucially, never gratuitously so, as a more grounded take on this material would threaten to be — but ultimately serves to ensure the humanity of those who make similar journeys will be foregrounded in any political discussion of migration, and without once becoming a mere “issues movie.” Io Capitano feels carefully researched in its subject matter, while the narrative itself is constructed with an intensity far more characteristic of Garrone’s genre work.

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Although Seydou (Seydou Sarr) and Moussa (Moustapha Fall) don’t make the decision to leave for mainland Europe on a whim, they plan to exit Senegal with a distinctly teenage lack of short-term-thinking. There are vague hopes of starting a music career and perhaps earning enough to send back home, but nothing set in stone. Seydou and Moussa are even more unprepared for the journey itself, which requires them to travel to the Libyan capital of Tripoli — which, to be clear, is on the opposite side of the continent — where they’ll be able to set sail for Italy. Following the advice of human traffickers and various contemptuous authority figures, the protagonists’ slim savings quickly dwindle after having to pay for fake passports and police bribes as they make their first illegal crossings between nations. And that’s the easiest stretch of the journey, which eventually requires Seydou and Moussa to disembark from public transport to cross large swathes of desert on foot, warned by their guide that criminal gangs operate on this route, ready to steal anything they can get their hands on.

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As seen through the eyes of two vulnerable teens — who, for the most part, aim to present themselves as anything but vulnerable — the heightened nature of these threats as presented by Garrone feels justified. What is a teenager’s perspective, after all, if not equally as melodramatic as that of a child, but with a keener sense of grit? In keeping with the magical realist predecessors from his homeland that wove the supernatural into the everyday lives of miserable people, the filmmaker complements many of the most harrowing moments with an almost spiritual surrealism. This tone is most clearly articulated by a desert hallucination, in which a frail woman dies from exhaustion next to the protagonists before her spirit immediately returns. Even as the moment can be chalked down to a dehydration-fueled mirage — one could uncharitably compare this scene to several in Kangaroo Jack (2003) — it’s the most extreme encapsulation of Io Capitano’s unique perspective of two boys hopeless with wonder at the wider world who clutch onto whichever way shields them from its greatest horrors.

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Even when Io Capitano is being more blunt with regards to Seydou and Moussa’s circumstances, the grave danger they find themselves in is filtered through the sensibilities of a teenage boy. Most obviously, this is via the outsized importance the narrative places on the protagonists smuggling money out of the country in a way criminal gangs won’t be able to obtain it (fill in the blanks). Boys of that age find nothing funnier than scatological humor — truly, the most universal language — and by staying within their perspective, all horrors are filtered through the perspective of two kids who find their circumstances too funny to completely grasp the danger they’ve placed themselves in. This isn’t the first time Garrone has foregrounded a knottier, more probing drama within a deliberately limited character study, as his underseen 2012 film Reality is about a budding Big Brother contestant whose life becomes increasingly warped by his obsession with the show, placing the audience directly within his fracturing mindset. Although Garrone tackles heavier subject matter with Io Capitano, the director’s greatest asset remains his ability to stay true to the protagonists’ perspectives. The film skilfully avoids becoming a reductive “issues movie” because Garrone only shows the horrors from the Seydou and Moussa’s vantage point, not those of a filmmaker aiming to make a grand, humanitarian statement.

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When Io Capitano ceases to overlook the central danger altogether, Garrone still does all he can to present atrocities in the way a terrified teen would perceive them. For example, a torture chamber where kidnapped people are held in exchange for ransom money has the same production design one might expect from a Hostel or Taken movie, and the nail-biting final act (which grants the film its title) is presented as a warped underdog sports drama. Throughout, there are several expository details that both ground and grant further light on Seydou and Moussa’s nightmarish situation, but Garrone refuses to dwell on them, as Io Capitano is a film nominally about the experiences of two vulnerable children, and not the wider geopolitical context they have been placed within. Of course, neither the director nor his screenwriters can completely isolate the main characters from their circumstances, as it’s abundantly clear that they are the latest in a long line of people to be exploited by this system. But by devoting attention entirely to the ways in which the protagonists have been mistreated — from their points of view — Io Capitano becomes a stronger work entirely. Seydou and Moussa are victims of their circumstances but would never regard themselves as such, which makes their harrowing perspectives far more urgent to witness.

Alistair Ryder (@YesitsAlistair) is a film and TV critic based in Manchester, England. By day, he interviews the great and the good of the film world for Zavvi, and by night, he criticizes their work as a regular reviewer at outlets including The Film Stage and Looper.

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