What secret would destroy your life? Now imagine your lover holding the detonator.
Pietro is a revered teacher, Teresa his brilliant and precocious student. Their affair is both illicit and tempestuous. After one fight, Teresa suggests that each tell the other a secret, one so shameful or shocking that were it to be made public, it would destroy that person’s life. Time passes, Pietro’s stature as a writer grows and his family settles into the comfort of a bourgeois life. But he is haunted by the possibility that Teresa may one day reappear and tear apart his world with the secret she knows.
Acting
Elio Germano's trembling hands say everything his mouth won't.
Direction
Luchetti turns Rome's sun-drenched streets into a suffocating trap.
Writing
The pact itself — devastating in its elegant simplicity.
Director
Daniele Luchetti
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
The film adapts Domenico Starnone's novel 'Confidenza,' itself a response to Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan quartet — another exploration of female rage and male literary ego.
The 136-minute runtime deliberately mirrors Pietro's psychological imprisonment; every elongated scene asks whether freedom from Teresa was ever possible, or merely deferred.
IT
