“Everyone I know is either dead or in jail. I want to become a boss. I want to have supermarkets, stores, factories, I want to have women. I want three cars, I want respect when I go into a store, I want to have warehouses all over the world. And then I want to die. I want to die like a man, like someone who truly commands. I want to be killed.”

‘Gommorah’, directed by Matteo Garrone in 2008, is an Italian crime drama set in the Scampia-Secondigliano suburbs of Naples. The film follows the effect of organised criminal gangs on five groups of people: two independent criminals who go against the main gangs, a high-end tailor, a worker at a toxic waste disposal site, a young delivery boy, and a financial middleman. Each story unflinchingly focuses on the corrupting influence of the violence on the individuals, and the different levels the crime operates, from street-level drug deals, to vicious murders, to corporate fraud and finally to chemical pollution. Much like Fernando Meirelles 2002 Brazilian movie ‘City of God’, there is an epic feel to this film, and like ‘City of God’, also based on a real set of stories, there is a sense of journalistic horror. The crime in ‘Gommorah’ exists in a weird, isolated space that is almost uncannily free from conventional authority. Like ‘City of God’, the presentation of crime in Garrone’s movie turns a section of the city into an abstracted nightmarish place. What struck me, however, was how intricately the five stories in the film thematically and narratively wove together. One of the scriptwriters, Gianni Di Gregorio, went on to write and direct ‘Mid-August Lunch’, produced by Garrone, it is as far from ‘Gommorah’ as you can get, but makes a curiously pleasing companion piece at the other end of the spectrum: as gentle and likeable as ‘Gommorah’ is hard and unrelentingly bleak.

Would I recommend it? Yes – watch in an obvious double bill with ‘City of God’, or a more contrasting one with either ‘Mid-August Lunch’ or Paolo Sorrentino’s ‘The Great Beauty’.