‘The Kingdom’: Cannes Review

Dir/scr: Julien Colonna. France. 2024. 109 mins.

Corsica, 1995. Fifteen-year-old Lesia (Ghjuvanna Benedetti) steals a kiss with a boy at a party and arranges to meet him at the beach in the afternoon. It’s normal teenage stuff. But Lesia is no normal teenager. She’s the daughter of the notorious kingpin of a Corsican crime family. Before she makes it to the beach, she is driven to an isolated house where her father, Pierre-Paul (Saveriu Santucci), is holed up with his troops. A war between rival gangs is brewing. And Lesia, reluctant to leave the father she loves but rarely sees, finds herself on the frontline. The muscular feature debut by Corsican-born Julien Colonna covers familiar territory but benefits from a fresh child’s-eye perspective and a magnetic performance from non-professional actor Benedetti.

There is a bruising authenticity to the picture

It’s surprising, perhaps, that there haven’t been more films immersed in the dark world of the Corsican mafia – the island has one of the highest murder rates in Europe after all, so there’s no shortage of dramatic material to mine. But The Kingdom joins Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet and Olivier Panchot’s De Guerre Lasse as one of relatively few pictures to venture into Cosica’s criminal underworld.

Born and raised on the island, Colonna (whose previous work includes the award-winning short Confession and the mini-series Brutal: Taste Of Violence) clearly knows his subject – there is a bruising authenticity to the picture that comes, in no small part, from a lengthy and meticulous casting process. The largely non-professional ensemble is full of intimidating, bullet-headed men who look like they know their way around a shotgun. Canal+ and Netflix co-financed the film and have French broadcasting rights for first and second windows respectively. Elsewhere, the picture should be of interest to festival programmers and arthouse distributors in the market for gritty genre fare and promising new talent.

These men may look terrifying, but for Lesia they are like family: surrogate uncles, a beloved godfather named Joseph (Thomas Bronzini), a junior mobster Santu (Andrea Cossu) who treats her like a kid sister. She knows this world, is familiar with its rules (no questions, absolutely no calls from the phone in the house where they are hiding out). Even so, she initially chafes against the interruption to her plans and tries to call her boyfriend, first from a phone box and, later, when the men have left en masse for a council of war, illicitly from the villa itself.

It’s shortly after she does this that the violence escalates and the body count starts to rise. Guilty for breaking her father’s cardinal rule, and terrified of losing her one remaining parent (her mother died when Lesia was much younger), she slips away from the minders who were meant to deliver her back to the relative safety of her aunt’s house, and returns to her father’s side. As the noose tightens, Lesia and her father are forced to go on the run together. For Lesia, who hunts boar – something she secretly hates  – just so she can spend time with her dad, the chance to hide out in a holiday camp, almost like a normal family, is something to be treasured.

Colonna is adept at capturing the sudden temperature changes in the room each time news filters through of another casualty in the escalating blood feud – the men are reliant on local television news, which runs reports about car bombs and drive-by shootings alongside incongruously chipper reports about back-to-school shopping. Gun crime, the film suggests, is just an accepted part of the day to day fabric of life in Corsica. But the eye for an eye for an eye inevitability of the cycling violence in this assured drama does not lessen the film’s potency.