Mussolini: Son of the Century

Filmmaker Joe Wright has a particular flair for making period pieces feel vibrant, urgent, and presciently reflective of our current conditions. Mussolini: Son of the Century is Wright’s eight-part adaptation of the 2018 novel M: Son of the Century by Antonio Scurati. From its opening minutes, a montage of archival footage from Benito Mussolini’s reign and downfall in Italy is paired with Luca Marinelli, playing the dictator, narrating his awareness of his own death, and Son of the Century declares itself as a rejection of stuffy biopics. Instead, the miniseries is a riot, a blending of direct-to-camera addresses, puppetry, anachronistic needle drops, and rave-like political rallies that captures how Mussolini was, for a certain segment of the population, a rock star, someone who wielded his own intense charisma for grotesque personal gain. Marinelli’s bombastic performance is impossible to look away from, even as he sneers about murdering rivals and goofily smiles after saying “Make Italy great again”—he’s a product of his environment and a harbinger of fascists to come. With Marinelli’s boldness and Wright’s embellishments of form, Son of the Century traces how someone like Mussolini could rise to the top of a political circus and pull all the ladders up behind him, creating a top-down authoritarianism that existed only to feed his own ego. For its mercurial storytelling style and its painstakingly detailed documentation of how absolute power corrupts absolutely, Mussolini: Son of the Century wins a Peabody Award.