Venice Lineup Brings Psychological Thrillers, True Crime and Dark International Cinema

Venice’s latest lineup spans psychological thrillers, true crime, political trauma and haunting international stories across its major sections. The Burning Grief / Venice

Venice Unveils Full Lineup With Psychological Thrillers, True Crime and Dark Genre Visions

The Venice Film Festival has unveiled a wide-ranging slate that brings psychological thrillers, true crime, political trauma and darker genre filmmaking into several of the festival’s major sections.

While this isn’t a horror-heavy lineup in the traditional sense, there are several titles that should immediately be on the radar for HMU readers. From Cédric Kahn’s A Place to Heal and Marco Bechis’ politically charged Back to Buenos Aires to Edoardo Gabbriellini’s true-crime-inspired The City of the Living and Phuttiphong Aroonpheng’s haunting The Burning Giants, Venice continues to make room for filmmakers working along the darker edges of international cinema.

A Place to Heal — In Competition

Following The Goldman Case, Cédric Kahn returns with A Place to Heal, directing and starring in a story centered on teenagers inside an adolescent psychiatric ward.

Seventeen-year-old Lucia is brought back to a public hospital by police and reunited with Eloïse, a longtime patient. There, she meets other teenagers navigating their own struggles as an overstretched medical team attempts to balance treatment, family involvement and the realities of an underfunded department.

The fragile equilibrium begins to shift with the arrival of a mysterious new patient named Enzo.

Rather than approaching its subject as conventional genre material, A Place to Heal appears focused on the complicated relationships between patients and caregivers and the possibility of finding moments of connection and hope within an extremely difficult environment.

Back to Buenos Aires — In Competition

Marco Bechis brings deeply personal history into Back to Buenos Aires, a psychological thriller and courtroom drama informed by the filmmaker’s own experience of being kidnapped and imprisoned during Argentina’s military dictatorship.

Set in 2008, the film follows Mariano Guerra (Adriano Giannini) as he returns to Argentina after 33 years in Italy to testify against the former military officers responsible for kidnapping, torturing and enslaving him.

While staying in accommodations provided for witnesses, Mariano encounters other survivors from his captivity. Their conversations and testimonies force decades of unresolved memories back to the surface.

The courtroom may offer legal judgment, but Back to Buenos Aires appears more interested in a much harder question: what does justice actually mean to someone who has spent decades living with the burden of survival?

Imperium — Out of Competition / Venice Open

Filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa heads into the archives for Imperium, assembling footage originally captured by Italian filmmakers traveling throughout the Soviet Union between 1970 and 1973.

Without voice-over or traditional commentary, the documentary travels from Moscow toward increasingly remote communities, revealing the enormous cultural, religious and social differences between people living under a government determined to project a unified Soviet identity.

The recovered footage becomes more than a historical artifact, examining the contradictions of an empire attempting to standardize vastly different cultures and the colonial dynamics whose consequences continue to resonate across the former Soviet sphere.

The Girl With the Leica — Orizzonti Opening Film

Alina Marazzi puts pioneering war photographer Gerda Taro back at the center of her own story with The Girl With the Leica.

The film follows Taro during her final day in Paris before returning to the Spanish front in July 1937. Memories of political activism, exile from Nazi Germany, her relationship with photographer André Friedmann and her discovery of photography begin intersecting as the film builds its portrait of an artist determined to use the camera as an instrument of resistance.

Taro and Friedmann famously created the professional identity “Robert Capa,” with photographs taken by Taro later attributed to Capa. Marazzi’s film seeks to restore the photographer’s own artistic and political identity.

The City of the Living — Orizzonti Competition

One of the lineup’s most immediately intriguing titles for true-crime audiences is Edoardo Gabbriellini’s The City of the Living.

Freely inspired by Nicola Lagioia’s award-winning true-crime work surrounding a case that shocked Rome and Italy, the film avoids simply reconstructing the crime. Instead, Gabbriellini turns toward the emotional and cultural circumstances surrounding it.

The story follows 23-year-old Luca, an adopted young man moving between Rome’s suburbs and city center while attempting to determine what his future might look like.

Behind that ordinary existence, however, Luca is living a double life.

Following an apparently random encounter one night, his life is shattered by an act of senseless violence.

The Burning Giants — Orizzonti Competition

After winning Best Film in Orizzonti with Manta Ray in 2018, Thai filmmaker Phuttiphong Aroonpheng returns with The Burning Giants.

Inspired by a real-life case, the film focuses on atrocities committed against the Karen people, an ethnic minority living across Thailand and Myanmar.

A mysterious smoke spreads through western Thailand, bringing with it a strange infectious disease that leaves victims appearing as though they have been burned by an invisible fire.

A Karen villager is arrested in the jungle and transported to a quarantine center while his wife seeks refuge in Bangkok. Both dream of returning home, but forest rangers are preparing to burn their village to make way for a national park.

Then the film pushes further into the surreal.

An abandoned theater hidden in the jungle becomes home to ogre soldiers fleeing an ancient king’s army, creating a mythological reflection of the displacement and violence confronting the villagers themselves.

The combination of infection, political violence, mythology and surreal imagery could make The Burning Giants one of the festival’s most interesting genre-adjacent discoveries.

Agata the Writer — Giornate degli Autori Competition

Mia Wasikowska leads first-time feature filmmaker Kuba Dorabialski’s Agata the Writer, a drama examining creativity, privilege and the responsibilities involved in telling someone else’s story.

Agata travels from Sydney to Sarajevo intending to write a novel about war. But as she begins gathering material, locals challenge both her motivations and her authority to transform their experiences into fiction.

At the same time, provocative artworks begin mysteriously disappearing.

As Agata’s novel develops, the story shifts away from war itself toward smaller moments of human resilience, forcing the writer to reconsider not only what story she wants to tell, but whether it is hers to tell in the first place.

Venice Offers Plenty for Genre Fans to Watch

This particular group of Venice selections may stretch well beyond conventional horror, but there is a strong current of psychological darkness running throughout the lineup.

Back to Buenos Aires confronts torture and the lingering trauma of political violence. The City of the Living approaches true crime from the human circumstances preceding an act of brutality. The Burning Giants combines disease, displacement and mythology, while A Place to Heal explores vulnerable young people confronting trauma within an institutional environment.

For HMU readers, The Burning Giants and The City of the Living are probably the two immediate titles to keep especially close tabs on, but Venice has once again provided a lineup where some of the year’s more unusual dark cinema could emerge well before these films reach wider audiences.

We’ll be watching closely as the festival gets underway and these titles begin making their way in front of audiences.