The Monster of Florence Review 2025 Tv Show Series Cast Crew Online
From creators Leonardo Fasoli and Stefano Sollima, and based on the non-fiction book Il Monstro di Firenze by Gianluca Monastra, Netflix’s The Monster of Florence is a true crime thriller about a case that rocked Italy roughly half a century ago. The miniseries is fittingly disturbing yet highly watchable thanks to well-drawn characters, strong performances, and all-encompassing period detail. The crime thriller is darkly captivating throughout its four-episode length, but ultimately might leave some viewers cold due to the ambiguity of its topic and a non-linear narrative that’s often inspired and occasionally frustrating. Overall, the series delivers enough visceral terror to justify a watch for fans of particularly grim fare.
Despite some flaws in execution, The Monster of Florence is a frightening and impressively thoughtful exploration of what kind of mind could conceivably carry out serial murder. It’s particularly refreshing to see this soon after Netflix’s ghastly and exploitative Monster: The Ed Gein Story. The Monster of Florence is a vastly superior and more thematically responsible project, and it’s possible the series could receive some traction on the streamer, especially given its release date near the height of spooky season.
The Monster of Florence is a non-linear ensemble piece focusing on a series of brutal slayings in the early ’80s that may or may not be directly connected to similar killings in the ’60s. Local Italian authorities are equal parts mortified and stumped by a grisly scene where a young couple was shot and further mutilated in their car late at night. The sexualized and cold-blooded crime echoes other local scenes from the past with a fairly consistent makeup. Young couples in various states of hooking up, usually in the back of cars, are shot in cold blood. The bodies, particularly those of the female victims, are stabbed and mutilated in similarly depraved patterns. An earlier crime resulted in a conviction and imprisonment, but it quickly becomes clear that these crimes are far more complicated than authorities perhaps originally thought.
Not much here is clear, though, as The Monster of Florence is based on a series of unsolved crimes, and the narrative is intentionally something of a labyrinth. It works best in its first two episodes when mostly exploring a tense scenario at the home of married couple Stefano (Marco Bullitta) and Barbara (Francesca Olia). Under financial strain, the pair has to put out an ad for a roommate. Salvatore (Valentino Mannias) turns out to be something of a nightmare, a sexually-charged, misogynist creep with a disturbed past we’re slowly made privy to via the series’ numerous flashbacks. These three characters are eerily compelling, and their relationships are intertwined and strained in ways that continue to reveal themselves.
Watching the early stretches of The Monster of Florence, in the company of these three and their disturbing behavior, it’s easy to be reminded of one of the seminal films in this genre, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Like that rather infamous classic, these three-hander portions of Monster of Florence are a convincing study in the desperate and depraved dynamics between three people on the fringes of homicidal tragedy.
The filmmaking craft is uniformly excellent, but The Monster of Florence loses its footing a bit around the halfway mark. As the script’s aperture opens up beyond the most interesting characters, and the ambitious narrative techniques really fire up, the result is simultaneously impressive and a little distracting. The non-linear narrative, unreliable narrators, and some genuinely effective plot twists yield mixed results. Given these cases’ unsolved nature, obviously some of the ambiguity here is understandable, even required, but it’s easy to imagine some viewers who invest in Monster of Florence will feel somewhat underwhelmed by the anticlimactic conclusion following some uneven pacing.
The actors deserve a lot of credit here. Mannias is remarkably creepy, many of the shows’ most memorable moments are courtesy of the intense discomfort Salvatore elicits in everyone around him, even when we’re not fully aware of the extent of his transgressions. Olia’s Barbara is a pretty haunting figure as well. The Monster of Florence makes Italian society of the time appear, frankly, to be an unimaginable hell for women, and Barbara is a tragic victim of social and personal circumstance who eventually makes consequential if somewhat sympathetic and understandable decisions that further annihilate any chance at a positive outcome for her or her family.
The Monster of Florence’s technical work is terrific across all departments here, with the cinematography some of the best you’ll see on television this year, and the production design and costumes adding to an overall immersive sense of time and place. There is one scene set in 1983 intended to homage a now-beloved film that doesn’t entirely track. A radio host announces the Vangelis score of Blade Runner as if the film is widely revered, and two young lovers, just prior to getting butchered, enact the famous “Tears in Rain” scene as if it’s already a well-established part of culture. Blade Runner was rather infamously a critical and box-office bomb that few people saw, and even fewer people liked, in 1982.
Beyond that, the period detail is mostly consistent and always sumptuous in a way that oddly complements the utter repulsiveness of these crimes and this subject matter. The property that Monster of Florence most clearly evokes is David Fincher’s time-spanning period masterpiece Zodiac, which was clearly an influence. Though this Netflix true crime miniseries doesn’t reach those same heights (admittedly, not many crime films or series have), it’s often remarkable, lingering long after the final episode is over.
