Stream It Or Skip It: ‘On My Skin’ On Netflix, About A Notorious Italian Court Case

In 2009, a young surveyor named Stefano Cucchi mysteriously died in prison a week after being arrested on minor drug charges. He never got a chance to go to trial. His case was among over 170 mysterious deaths in Italian prisons in the late 2000s, and is the basis of the new film On My Skin. 

ON MY SKIN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: On My Skin details the last week in the life of Stefano Cucchi (Alessandro Borghi), a young man with a past history of heroin addiction who has gotten relatively clean by the time we see him October 15, 2009. He’s a surveyor, following in the footsteps of his father Giovanni (Max Tortora), a boxer on the side, and as most young men in Italy are, devoted to his mother.

We see him cut a block of some brown substance and hide it in his sock right before he goes about his day. After visiting his family, he’s in his car late at night, smoking and talking with a friend, when the police arrive. Only it’s not the police, it’s the Carabinieri, the country’s military-style police force. Thinking he’s doing more than smoking cigarettes, they search him and find the stuff he has hidden in his sock, which turns out to be enough hash to arrest him on intent to distribute charges.

Before he’s arraigned, though, he’s beaten to a pulp by the Carabinieri officers and detectives that arrested him, ostensibly because of the attitude he showed them during the bust. As the week goes on, and he gets transferred to different holding cells, the Regina Coeli prison and ultimately a prison hospital, Stefano’s condition worsens, though he refuses treatment. Sometimes he screams out tat the Carabinieri did this to him, other times he says nothing, afraid of reprisals.

In the meantime, the Cucchi family, led by Stefano’s sister Ilaria (Jasmine Trinca) tries to get word about his condition, and try to visit him, only they’re rebuffed at every turn by a bureaucracy designed to frustrate people into giving up. The first time they see Stefano is when his body is transferred to the morgue, and even then it takes some doing.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Midnight Express immediately comes to mind, because of the idea of a guy going to prison for a minor charge and things spiraling out of control. But, this is slower-paced than that movie, but at the same time, it’s more harrowing, for reasons we’ll talk about in a bit.

Performance Worth Watching: We don’t see a ton of Trinca as Stefano’s sister until the second half of the movie, but she’s great as the person who angrily wants to fight through the extensive red tape in order to see her brother.

Memorable Dialogue: “Having a son like me, they really didn’t deserve it,” says a near-dead Stefano to a voice from the next cell over he knows as Marco. He thinks that his family hasn’t come to visit because they’re ashamed of him.

Single Best Shot: In a movie distinguished by how dark all the shots are, a scene of a gaunt Stefano laid out on a rotating bed in a medical scanner is a stark contrast.

Sex and Skin: Stefano is told to strip down so they can see if he’s hiding anything else.

Our Take: The fact that On My Skin is based on a true story makes the movie all the more harrowing to watch. Stefano Cucchi was no saint, but he was trying to live his life, and a week later he was dead under mysterious circumstances. But at the same time, director Alessio Cremonini’s depiction of Cucchi’s last week is slow-moving and imbalanced, concentrating on his physical and emotional deterioration and giving short shrift to his family’s attempts at getting access to him.

The movie progresses with little tension, because you know at some point Stefano is going to die. And Borghi’s performance as Stefano is fantastic; even while his heath quickly goes downhill, he’s defiant, not wanting to talk about who beat him up one second then screaming it at the top of his voice the second. He refuses to change out of the clothes he was arrested in because he thinks he’s being unfairly detained. But we also see the lifelong epileptic refuse care on multiple occasions, throwing into doubt that the Italian federal prison system didn’t at least try to get him help.

What we would have wanted to see more of was not only the Cucchi family’s increasingly frustrating attempts to get to see Stefano and get some answers, but also the aftermath, when the family fought to bring those responsible to justice and get the laws changed. All of that was detailed in a postscript, and it feels like that should have been the thrust of the film to begin with.

Our Call: SKIP IT. While the performances are excellent, On My Skin is too slow to give the story of Stefano Cucchi justice.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.