Continuing the trail of serial killers that opened the history with Ed Gein, followed by the Murdaugh family and capped last week by John Wayne Gacy, and that feels so perfect for the Halloween month just around the corner, we can now see on Netflix The Monster of Florence, the chilling Italian miniseries about the crimes that terrorized Italy in the 1980s.
Responsible for the murder of four couples between 1968 and 1985, little or nothing is known about the man the press dubbed with his nickname, and four decades later he remains one of the greatest criminal mysteries in Italy’s history. However, despite the scarcity of certainties, the production created by Stefano Solima and Leonardo Fasoli, known for their work on Gomorrah, has the capacity to be as intriguing as it is spine-tingling.
Premiered at the Venice Film Festival, The Monster of Florence is not your usual true crime, and here are the reasons you need to watch Netflix’s chilling Italian miniseries.
The Killer Who Emerged from the Darkness
Although the throughline of the production is the investigation into the crimes, The Monster of Florence is not a police miniseries, nor does the pace of its narration depend on the suspense of the story. Solima and Fasoli’s creation is more a portrait of a country, with its machismo and its entrenched patriarchal society to obscene degrees, than a tale that one day discovered its greatest nightmare derived from its greatest silence, the violence against women.
Scene from Netflix’s new miniseries, The Monster of Florence.
The Netflix miniseries’ narrative begins on June 19, 1982, when Paolo Mainardi and Antonella Migliorini, aged 22 and 19, decide to stop in a clearing along a provincial road to do what they could not do at their parents’ houses. By that time, there had already been, as far as could be known, three more crimes, and Antonella had already expressed to her friends the fear that isolated places at night produced for her, like the ones where the crimes had occurred.
Although Paolo tried to flee, as the investigation records and the position of the car, found in the ditch opposite where they stopped, suggest, Antonella died at the scene due to gunshots and he died shortly after in the hospital. Two deaths that led investigators to back up in time more than they thought was the start of a bloody murder spree against couples, and which shifts the narration back to the 1960s.
Portrait of a Macho Society
In The Monster of Florence we do not know whether the investigators stayed up late trying to resolve the crimes, whether they were threatened with transfers or suffered harassment from the press or distressed relatives. Because soon after it begins, Stefano Mele, his family and his surroundings become the portrait of a country that did not flinch when a dress was ripped off a woman in the street, or of a society in which the guilty party was always the woman.
Scene from Netflix’s new miniseries, The Monster of Florence.
Followed by others who, like him, are not guilty of all the crimes that have piled up on the investigators’ table, but are guilty of treating women as mere objects, of employing psychological and physical violence against them, of using them as mere vehicles to meet family expectations, anchored in absurd traditions.
In reality, as in the real investigation that remains open, the monster perhaps was not a single one, and many monsters were necessary to allow that four decades later eight couples’ families still have no answers. The Netflix miniseries does not have them either, but it is an interesting approach to a country and to crimes that, like those of the Alcàsser case, marked an entire generation and planted more suspicions than certainties.
