GracePaolo Sorrentino’s latest film, was premiered at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival 2025, where it opened the festival and was well received by the public from its first viewing. It will be visible in theaters from January 13, 2026, although there were no shortage of advance screenings during the Christmas period. Once again Sorrentino succeeded reach the heart of the viewer by exciting them with a story, completely invented, involving faith and reason, but also human frailty. The director managed to give each scene a particular narrative, which does not leave the spectators indifferent.
In the cast of Grace two exceptional performers stand out: Toni Servillo and Anna Ferzettisupported by a large group of very solid actors: Orlando Cinque, Massimo Venturiello, Milvia Marigliano, Giuseppe Gaiani, Giovanna Guida, Alessia Giuliani, Roberto Zibetti, Vasco Mirandola, Linda Messerklinger and Rufin Doh Zeyenouin. A compact whole that gives body and depth to the screenplay written by Paolo Sorrentino, precisely conveying its moral and emotional nuances.
Toni Servillo plays the role of Mariano De SantisPresident of the Republic who has reached the end of his mandate: a man of institutions, rigorous and solitary, marked by the loss of his wife and supported in his private and professional life by his daughter Dorotea (Anna Ferzetti), a brilliant jurist. It is precisely in the relationship with her that the film finds one of its most intense emotional cores, a constant dialogue between affection, law and civil responsibility.
Before leaving his role and returning to being a common citizen De Santis is called to rule on two requests for mercy. Delicate decisions, which force him to deal not only with legal rules, but above all with his own conscience. The President moves in uncertain terrain, where the moral weight of institutional choices inevitably reflects on the private sphere, generating doubts, questions and profound reflections on the very meaning of power.
Grace, measure and rigor in the last act of the President of the Republic
The movie follows the interior journey of the President of the Republic coming out with measure and rigor, showing a man who, until the end, tries not to betray the idea of responsibility that has always guided his work. A responsibility which, as Sorrentino suggests, should be the foundation of every authentic representative of the people. It’s no coincidence that the director he defined Grace a film about love, understood in its broadest sense: love for a daughter, for law, for a policy based on doubt and a sense of limits.
The director claims the desire to tell a different face of politics, today increasingly rare: that of a man capable of embodying a high and moral idea of public action, as it should be and as, too often, it doesn’t happen. A mission that the director apparently managed to achieve by bringing a different, intense and engaging film to theaters: the film is eagerly awaited, and will certainly be among the most viewed films of the new cinema season.
