Becoming a parent changes your life, but becoming the parent of a child with a disability can change it in ways nobody can fully prepare you for. There are appointments, routines, worries about the future and, depending on the child’s needs, a level of physical and emotional care that can continue for a long time. There is love, of course, enormous love, but love does not magically remove tiredness, frustration, fear or the simple human need to sometimes have a life outside caring for another person. Many parents carry all of this quietly and continue caring for their children for as long as they possibly can.

Talking about that reality requires enormous sensitivity and parents should be able to admit that something is difficult without anyone interpreting it as a lack of love, while people with disabilities should never be spoken about as burdens whose lives are somehow worth less. Somewhere inside that very difficult space comes Tommaso Landucci’s Children of the Monkey, a film that dares to confront feelings most parents would probably be afraid to admit.

Dario (Riccardo Scamarcio) is the father of Giacomo (Tancredi Naldini), a child with a disability. When Dario begins spending time with his brother’s teenage son, he discovers how much he enjoys being with him and, more painfully, how easily he slips into imagining another version of fatherhood. The teenager slowly becomes the son he once imagined he might have, while Dario gets to briefly experience being the father he thought he would be. Without a doubt, it is an uncomfortable premise and it should be.

Riccardo Scamarcio is outstanding as Dario, giving a performance that says a great deal even when the character himself says very little. He plays a father who clearly loves his son but is also exhausted and struggling with thoughts and emotions he probably wishes he didn’t have, especially as he begins to experience the kind of relationship with his nephew that he once imagined having with his own child.

There are moments when Dario’s behaviour is frustrating and others when it becomes genuinely difficult to watch. There is no doubt that Dario is enjoying the freedom of this imagined version of fatherhood, even as the reality of what he is doing begins to creep back in. It is a beautifully controlled performance, and one of those roles that asks an actor to communicate far more than what is written in the dialogue.

Tancredi Naldini’s Giacomo is equally important to the film because Children of the Monkey could have gone badly wrong if Giacomo existed only as the reason for his father’s unhappiness. Landucci is dealing with dangerous territory here; a story about a parent imagining life with a non-disabled child has to remember that the disabled child is still a person, not a narrative obstacle. The film is at its strongest when it understands that distinction and allows the discomfort to belong to Dario rather than saying there is something wrong with Giacomo’s existence.

The film is also honest about how difficult parenthood can be when so much of your life is spent caring for someone else. You can love your child deeply and still be tired, frustrated or sometimes wish that life had turned out differently, and having those thoughts doesn’t take that love away. But Children of the Monkey also doesn’t use Dario’s exhaustion to excuse everything he does. We may understand why he feels the way he does, but that doesn’t mean we have to agree with the choices he makes.

Landucci, making his first fiction feature, shows considerable confidence in sitting with that discomfort. The screenplay, written with Damiano Femfert, had already received major recognition before reaching the screen, including the Franco Solinas Award for Best Screenplay and prizes connected with the Sam Spiegel Film Lab. The finished film competed in Orizzonti at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, with Scamarcio also serving as one of its producers.

Films such as Children of the Monkey matter because they open conversations that are usually kept behind closed doors. We talk about unconditional parental love far more comfortably than we talk about exhaustion, resentment, grief, guilt or the fear of what will happen to a disabled child when their parents are no longer there to care for them. Landucci understands that finding something difficult doesn’t mean there is any less love. A parent can love their child more than anything and still be completely exhausted, or sometimes think about how different their life might have been. They might have thoughts they are afraid to admit, even to themselves, but the next morning they are still there, caring for their child and carrying on.

Children of the Monkey is a powerful and moving film because it is brave enough to talk about a side of parenthood that is rarely discussed.

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Written by Maggie Gogler

Featured image courtesy of Venice Film Festival

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