Buen Camino

Checco is a wealthy, vain and thoroughly superficial heir, living off the fortune his father built over sixty years of work. His father is now ill, his engagement to a young model keeps his self-image polished, and his fiftieth birthday is only days away. Then his daughter Cristal vanishes — and the comfortable architecture of his life develops its first crack.

Through his ex-wife Linda, a former model now an actress without roles, her partner Tarek, a Palestinian writer and director with an alternative lifestyle, and Cristal's best friend Corina, Checco learns where the girl has gone: onto the Camino de Santiago, walking some eight hundred kilometres on foot in search of a meaning for her own life. Convinced this is a phase to be terminated as quickly as possible, Checco sets off to collect her — in a Ferrari.

What follows is an improbable, footsore journey across Italy and Spain, along the pilgrim routes that converge on Santiago de Compostela. The car becomes useless, the luxury becomes ballast, and the errand of retrieval turns into something Checco never budgeted for: a chance to actually meet his daughter, and to find out who he is when nobody is impressed by him.

Gennaro Nunziante and Checco Zalone use the oldest pilgrimage route in Europe as a comic stress test for a very contemporary Italian type: the inheritor. Checco has not built anything; he has received everything, and the film quietly insists that a life you did not earn is a life you cannot explain to your child. The Camino is chosen precisely because it cannot be bought, delegated or accelerated — the only currency it accepts is footsteps.

The message is less religious than relational. Cristal walks to find meaning; Checco walks to retrieve her and ends up finding the same thing by accident. The film's argument is that fatherhood is not a status conferred by biology or funded by money but a practice — attention paid, distance covered, discomfort accepted. Its punchline is gentle rather than savage: the man who set out to bring his daughter back is the one who gets brought back.

Underneath sits a generational reckoning. Checco's own father worked sixty years and is now dying; Checco consumed those years; Cristal is refusing to consume them. The pilgrimage becomes the place where three generations of Italian ideas about what a life is for are made to walk in the same direction.

A sincere conversion story. The straightforward reading takes the Camino at face value: a superficial man walks a sacred route and is genuinely changed by it, and the reconciliation with his daughter is the film's earned reward. On this view the softening that some critics regretted is the point — Zalone at fifty writing about a character at fifty.

Buen Camino arrived as the event film of the Italian Christmas 2025 season and behaved accordingly. Distributed by Medusa on 25 December 2025, it dominated the domestic box office for 28 consecutive days, passed €68 million in 24 days to become the highest-grossing film in Italy, and finished its run around €76.6 million — figures that restated Zalone's status as the last reliable mass phenomenon of Italian cinema and, in a period of chronic anxiety about theatrical attendance, functioned as proof that a homegrown comedy could still fill rooms nationwide.

Its choice of subject also gave it a second life outside cinema. By building a mainstream comedy around the Camino de Santiago, the film handed one of Europe's oldest pilgrimage routes an enormous Italian-language shop window, with coverage tracking its locations from the Costa Smeralda and Rome to the Plaza del Obradoiro. The film was recognised at the David di Donatello awards, and moved to Netflix on 29 April 2026, where its themes of inherited wealth, absentee fatherhood and the search for meaning reached a second, domestic audience.

Critically it occupies a more contested place. Part of the press read it as Zalone in a softer, more sentimental register: at least one review argued that it lacks almost entirely the provocative, iconoclastic and anarchic spirit that had made him unique in Italy — the recurring question being whether a comedian who built his reputation on discomfort can survive his own turn toward tenderness.

Audience endorsement was overwhelming in the only currency that is unambiguous: attendance. The film held the top spot in Italy for 28 straight days, crossed €30 million by 29 December, €40 million by 1 January, €45 million by 2 January, €60 million by 8 January, and became the country's highest-grossing film on 18 January 2026 with over €68 million in 24 days, closing around €76.6 million. Those are numbers produced by repeat viewing and family audiences, consistent with a Christmas release pitched as comedy, family and adventure.

What clearly worked for the public was the combination viewers had come for: Zalone's comic persona reunited with Gennaro Nunziante after four previous hits, the spectacle of the Camino de Santiago and the Spanish and Italian locations, and a father-daughter emotional line broad enough to play across generations in the same room. The film's recognition at the David di Donatello added institutional confirmation to popular success.

The main line of criticism ran in the opposite direction. Reviewers who had valued Zalone as Italy's most disruptive comic voice found this outing markedly tamer — one review judged that it lacks almost entirely the provocative, iconoclastic and anarchic spirit that had made him unique — and the sentimental redemption arc became the divisive element: warmth for much of the audience, domestication for part of the press. The overall verdict is a crowd-pleasing, technically expansive and emotionally generous comedy that traded some of its author's bite for reach, and was rewarded with the biggest box office in Italian history.