The Grace of the Uncertain

At the end of his tenure Mariano De Santis, an imaginary President of Italy, confronts the moral and political legacy of his career. A meticulous man of law, Mariano must decide whether to finally sign a law that has been a decades-long controversy: the law of euthanasia.  

La Grazia (“Grace”) premiered at 2025 Venice Film Festival. It’s Paolo Sorrentino’s 11th feature film and 7th collaboration with actor Tony Servillo who was awarded the Coppa Volpi at Venice for this role. After The Hand of God (2021) and Parthenope (2024), respective depictions of adolescence and young adulthood, Academy and BAFTA Award–winning filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino returns to more familiar territory. With surreal atmospheres and detached irony he explores a character whose sense of identity collapses while entering the later stages of his life. Mariano De Santis a fictional yet highly plausible president of Italy reminds us of two iconic characters in Sorrentino’s filmography Giulio Andreotti (Il Divo, 2019) and Jep Gambardella (The Great Beauty, 2013) both portrayed by Toni Servillo.  

Mariano De Santis, the outgoing Italian president, is a scholar of law, a judge and, the author of a towering multi-volume legal textbook known by his students as the “K3: The Impossible Ascent”. His daughter Dorotea, also an exceptionally skilled lawyer, has spent years reviewing a law that would make euthanasia legal. Yet every time the bill is ready for Mariano’s signature, he underlines small details he feels must be perfected. With 6 months before the end of his father’s term of office Dorotea is certain he will never sign the law, leaving the decision to his successor. Mariano is looking forward to regaining his freedom and returning to the apartment he once shared with his beloved deceased wife. All he is left to do is attending surreal meetings, cultural events and, a fashion magazine interview. But when Dorotea presents him with a final presidential task deciding whether to grant the grace (to grant pardon) to two distinct cases of murder, Mariano veers away becoming obsessed with a personal mystery: his wife’s infidelity forty years earlier.    

In Italy, end-of-life legislation remains an unresolved and delicate matter, caught between constitutional rulings, political deadlock, and a deeply rooted Catholic tradition. The film approaches the subject from the perspective of a man who has spent all of his life establishing facts and pursuing absolute truth, to the point of analysis paralysis. If he signs it he’ll be a murderer, if he doesn’t he’ll be a torturer, that is his fear. At the same time, Mariano is entering the later stages of life, torn between his obsession with the past and his inability to fully grasp the contemporary world (a world creeping in techno beat by techno beat in full Sorrentino fashion). Certainty has always been his comfort, the main feature of his identity and career, yet certainty rarely applies to human life. As Sorrentino has noted, the question posed by Dorotea, “Who owns our days?” is deceptively simple. We may know the answer, but do we have the courage to face the uncertainty that comes with it?