A middle-aged money collector for the mob (Gianfelice Imparato) negotiates the rough terrain of Neapolitan slums. A kid (Salvatore Abruzzese) tries to become a foot soldier for local gangsters. A tailor (Salvatore Cantalupo) and a waste-management go-between play out their roles in peripheral syndicate-run businesses. Two punks (Marco Macor, Ciro Petrone) obsessed with Tony Montana – meta alert! – muscle in on the Mafia’s turf. These are the folks we follow in Garrone’s adaptation of Roberto Saviano’s 2006 book on the Camorra thugs plaguing Naples; each of the characters resides on the lower end of the criminal food chain. The more we see how delusions of grandeur and desperation force average citizens into increasingly dead-end situations, the clearer Gomorrah’s bigger picture becomes. Never mind the world of bada-bing and overstylised bang-bang that you normally associate with Mafia epics. This is a portrait of a region so infected with corruption that the infrastructure is rotting from the inside out.

A longtime social realist who isn’t above dropping in bits of guilty-pleasure grotesquerie, Garrone has never attempted anything quite this grand before, and his deft handling of multiple perspectives and deconstruction of screen myths suggests that he’s a born maker of mosaic movies. Every story strand informs the others, creating a devastating 360-degree view of how organised crime impacts the country’s everyday people. Once the shooting stops, all that’s left is the damage done.

David Fear

See our Matteo Garrone interview.

Read our other features:
Leader of the pack: Daniel Wu
Time regained: Wong Kar Wai
Presidential assassination: Oliver Stone
Van Dammage: JCVD

HKIFF Top ten list:
☆☆☆☆☆☆
Gomorrah (Dir Matteo Garrone)
Web exclusive: Matteo Garrone interview
Still Walking (Dir Hirokazu Kore'eda)
Hunger (Dir Steve McQueen)
Of Time and the City (Dir Terence Davies)
Web exclusive: Terence Davies interview