The Big Fake

The Big Fake (Il falsario) follows Toni, a young man who arrives in Rome carrying almost nothing but a talent for painting and the ambition to become a great artist. The capital of the 1970s has little use for his dreams and enormous use for his hands: what begins as copying the masters slides, almost imperceptibly, into a career as the most gifted forger in the country.

The film, set during Italy's anni di piombo — the "years of lead" — traces Toni's entanglement with the organized crime that ruled Rome in that decade, and with shadows far larger than any gang. Around him move the friends who came up from Rieti with him: don Vittorio, a newly ordained priest placed inside the Curia, and Fabio, nicknamed "Fabione," a metalworker with strong sympathies for the extra-parliamentary left. Three provincial boys, three different ways of being swallowed by the city.

Directed by Stefano Lodovichi and adapted from the 2008 non-fiction book Il falsario di Stato by journalists Nicola Biondo and Massimo Veneziani, the film offers a deliberately novelized account of a real life — one that brushes against the densest mysteries of modern Italian history. It is less a heist picture than a portrait of a man who discovers that in a country built on official fictions, the best counterfeiter is the one nobody ever sees.

At its heart, The Big Fake argues that forgery is not a deviation from Italian public life of the 1970s but its native language. Toni's crime is only the artisanal, honest version of what the state, the security services and the terror groups were doing on a national scale: manufacturing documents, signatures and truths to be believed.

Lodovichi frames his protagonist as a man of enormous talent and no authorship. Toni can paint like anyone except himself, and that emptiness — the absence of a signature of his own — is both the source of his genius and the wound that drives him. The film asks what happens to a person who is valued precisely for his ability to disappear into other people's names, and whose greatest works can never be claimed.

The larger message is a bleak one about a nation's memory: when the archive itself is a forgery, history becomes unreadable, and the only people who know what really happened are the ones who will never be allowed to say it.

The tragedy of a frustrated artist. On this reading the crime plot is scaffolding, and the real subject is a man with a great hand and no voice. Toni's fakes are the work of someone who would rather be famous for someone else's style than anonymous in his own — a story about talent misrouted rather than about politics.

The Big Fake arrives inside a long Italian tradition of cinema that relitigates the anni di piombo and the unresolved Moro affair — a lineage running from the political thrillers of the 1970s through more recent screen treatments of the same period. Its novelty is one of angle: rather than approaching the era through magistrates, terrorists or statesmen, it approaches it through a technician, a man whose hands touched the paperwork of national trauma without ever appearing in the official record.

Its release strategy also says something about how Italian historical material now travels. Premiering at the 20th Rome Film Festival in the audience-facing Grand Public strand and then going worldwide on Netflix on 23 January 2026, the film packages a specifically Italian set of traumas — the Curia, the extra-parliamentary left, the Roman underworld — for a global streaming audience. One English-language review framed exactly this, describing it as Netflix turning Italy's political turmoil into a crime thriller.

That framing drew the sharpest critical commentary. Reviewers questioned whether the genre machinery, and a certain softening of the protagonist's real nature, let the film trade historical inquiry for momentum. Its most durable cultural function may therefore be introductory: for a large international audience, it is the first encounter with the name Chichiarelli and with the possibility that Italy's darkest decade was partly written in someone else's handwriting.

Praised: Pietro Castellitto's central performance drew the most consistent approval — Italian critics described it as deliberately restrained, "poco dirompente" but well matched to the character the film wanted to build. The period reconstruction of 1970s Rome and the sheer strangeness of the underlying true story also worked in the film's favour, particularly for viewers meeting the Chichiarelli case for the first time via Netflix.

Criticised: The dominant reservation was a lack of originality. Reviewers felt that, measured against earlier Italian crime and anni di piombo screen work, the film offered little that was new in form or perspective. A second recurring objection concerned fidelity: critics argued the film "sacrifices the truth," citing the reversal of the ambush in the finale and what they saw as an inevitable softening of the protagonist's real nature.

Controversial: The novelization itself. Because the source is investigative journalism about genuinely unresolved episodes in Italian history, the decision to dramatize and smooth divided viewers between those who wanted a thriller and those who wanted an inquiry.

Verdict: A handsomely mounted, well-acted crime drama whose reach into one of Italy's murkiest chapters is more suggestive than rigorous — compelling as story, contested as history.