The Kingdom review - coming of age as the body count rises

The acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree is the bitter message of The Kingdom.

Director and co-writer Julien Colonna’s nerve-fraying drama about an adolescent girl’s sudden immersion in the brutal, uber-macho world of her father, a ruthless Corsican mafia boss, or caïd, builds inexorably to the only possible conclusion. It's still shocking; cathartic, too, but dispiritingly so.

While depicting Mafia violence as a pestilential evil, The Kingdom allows that crime families’ blood ties and Old Testament revenge ethos prevent insiders from walking away and starting their lives elsewhere. Such is the fate of Pierre-Paul Savelli (Severiu Santucci), as he painfully explains to his 15-year-old daughter, Lesia (Ghjuvanna Benedetti), during one of the increasingly intimate conversations they have after she joins him in hiding.

The film’s story of a naive teenager’s coming of age as a mobster’s daughter strongly recalls that of Jonas Carpignano’s equally affecting – but more impressionistic – Italian-language A Chiara (2021). The French-produced The Kingdom, Colonna's fiction feature debut, was shot by Antoine Cormier in the kind of social realist style that makes “gritty” American mob thrillers seem baroque, Whenever something terrible is about to occur, Audrey Ismaël’s ominous score throbs more ominously and the cutting quickens, but neither technique feels manipulative.

Since her mother’s premature death, Lesia has been raised by her Aunt Louise (Pascale Mariani) and has barely seen her dad because of his hazardous occupation. An above-average student who hangs in bars and clubs with her cousins, Lesia has just started dating a boy when Louise abruptly drives her off one morning to leave her with an older cousin, Santu (Andrea Cossu), who takes her to the secret coastal compound where Pierre-Paul is staying with hsi henchmen.

Lesia’s vulnerability as her father's daughter on the loose in Ajaccio and the ratcheting-up of the mafia clan war means he needs to keep her close. A failed car bomb assassination attempt on Corsica's regional president, who is friendly with Pierre-Paul, actually targeted one of the caïd’s “men of honour.”

A burly, grizzled czar of retributive justice who has the beard and protuberant ears of a Tolkien dwarf, Pierre-Paul takes Lesia sea fishing, swimming, and boar-hunting when he has time. Aware that these precious bonding sessions are finite, he calls them their “kingdom”; they are as poignant as the Turkish package holiday taken by Calum and Sophie in Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun (2022). Lesia tells a longtime woman friend (Marie Murcia) of Pierre-Paul, seemingly his sometime mistress, that she only endures boar-hunting to spend time with him. When he urges Lesia to shoot a boar she has lined up in her rifle’s scope – a sequence tensely crosscut with a mob hit he has ordered – she spares the animal. The simple but powerful metaphoric scene involving a boar’s carcass that silently opens the film suggests she is made of sterner stuff. 

Pierre-Paul initially keeps Lesia away from his planning sessions with his crew, which includes her fondly regarded godfather Joseph (Thomas Branzini). After the rival clan has Joseph murdered by an associate, it becomes clear to Lesia that not all the avuncular hardmen (pictured above with Ghjuvanna Benedetti) whom she breakfasts and watches TV news with will necessarily survive the next 24 hours. When Santu and the coldly efficient Sté (Anthony Moganti, above right) return from the hit, Lesia is overcome by relief and rushes to hug them.

After the gang is forced to relocate by a bratty act of defiance by Lesia, father and daughter disguise themselves – he as an ageing hipster, she as a bottle blonde (anachronistically more Billie Eilish than Debbie Harry). Having admitted Lesia to his conferences, Pierre-Paul continues her education by confessing to her his bloody history – his moral justification of it providing her with an uneviable legacy. He fled to Venezuela with his wife in his early thirties after eliminating the twenty or so men who had conspired to kill his father – in front of him – when he was six. 

During their 13-year South American idyll, Pierre-Paul lovingly reminisces, Lesia was born there. Three years later they came home – presumably so he could partake in international drug trafficking opportunities afforded “Union Corse” in the 1980s and the rejuvenated clan warfare complicated by the enmity of the paramilitary National Liberation Front of Corsica.

By channelling his deglamourising take on mob violence through the wide-eyed Lesia’s subjectivity, Colonna enables viewers to share in her distress and her mounting fear for him as a marked man with most of his nine lives used up. The alacrity with which she adapts to his lifestyle and values gives pause; there’s more than a hint of animal instinct in it. 

Flawlessly performed by non-professional Corsican actors, The Kingdom, which is set in 1995, ends on a diminuendo but slightly ambiguous note. What would Lesia be doing now if she'd made it to 45 without being sprayed by bullets? Whatever she’d be running, it wouldn't be a stall in a farmer’s market.

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