“The Sold Out Apartment” takes a “very Italian nightmare” (if one can call it that) and uses it as the keystone to develop the entire film into what seems like a real social experiment in miniature: forcing people who would otherwise have ignored each other to live on top of each other, to share times, habits, invisible borders.
The series is a RaiPlay Original created by Francesco Apolloni and directed by Giulio Manfredonia, set in Rome, in the Centocelle district.
Real estate scam as a fuse
Three couples discover that they have paid a deposit for the same apartment and, in order not to lose it, they all decide to stay. Forced coexistence becomes the real driving force, because it shifts the problem from the abstract level (“who is right?”) to the concrete level (“how do we live now?”).
Once this is established, the house stops being an object and becomes a continuous question. Who decides the times? Who occupies the bathroom when time is short? Who “passes” in the corridor as if it were a public road?
A shared interior and a comedy of friction
“The Sold Out Apartment” treats cohabitation as daily friction. In that friction something recognizable happens: intimacy comes upon you, even when no one invited it. There is the desire to protect the couple, there is the need to keep face, there is the control that disappears as soon as the living room becomes common territory.
And what is left when privacy becomes a luxury? What happens to tenderness when everything is necessarily shared?
Rome, Centocelle and emotion
The setting in Centocelle brings to the stage a contemporary Rome made up of movements, precarious contracts, temporary rooms that remain alive much longer than expected. The city, here, weighs heavily because it determines rhythms and choices: wasted time, distances, difficulty in keeping work and relationships together.
The space in which you live
Housing insecurity, told in comedy, remains concrete precisely because it enters into the dynamics of a couple: it changes the way in which one loves, one fights, one resists; and the economic problem immediately translates into nerves, tiredness, strategies and compromises.
The house as a pact
Underneath the initial situation, “The Sold Out Apartment” talks about a pact: coexistence as continuous negotiation. A treatment made up of micro-decisions that teach you to wait your turn. Giving up a corner, giving up a victory because tomorrow you wake up in the same space.
The series suggests an unromantic and very real truth: home is an emotional contract; and when the house becomes unstable, the rest moves too. The body registers uncertainty, couples metabolize it, relationships become rigid or dirty again. Sometimes you even discover a form of solidarity, but it always comes with a price: learning to stay within the limits.
Cast, pace, direction
Being an ensemble comedy, chemistry matters more than the “applause” scene. The cast includes, among others, Giorgio Pasotti, Giulia Bevilacqua and Euridice Axen. Giulio Manfredonia’s direction works on the interior as theatre: if the rhythm holds, the apartment stops looking like a closed set and becomes an accelerator, a place where everything feels stronger because there is no space to escape.
Criticism and reception
“The Sold Out Apartment” tends to be divided between two audiences. Those looking for continuous twists and turns may find it “small”; those who love environmental stories recognize the challenge: using comedy to talk about precariousness, intimacy and daily survival without transforming the theme into a lesson.
There is also an interesting detail: the project was played in festival contexts before streaming, a sign of an idea conceived as a choral story, not as a simple filler.
But there’s a reason why he has the chance to be so successful: he takes a raw nerve (house, money, trust) and stages it with a lightness that doesn’t erase the weight. When in good shape, it leaves a simple and annoying question, one of those that remain: what are we really willing to share, when space is limited?
