“Todo modo”, a film that shook consciences

A spiritual retreat in an isolated place, important men speaking in whispers, an epidemic outside that cuts contact with the world. Then, a death and yet another “Todo modo” by Elio Petri starts out as an idea from a black novel and transforms into a vision that makes the observer’s pulse rise, crushing him against the back of the armchair.

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A film that is pure tension

But “Todo modo” is not a simple thriller: born from the pen of Leonardo Sciascia, it uses suspense to bring out human behavior and rhythm as an experimental metronome; where it tightens, where it hurts, it cracks its characters in a labyrinth where they themselves are relegated: Zafer’s “hermitage”, a closed place that seems born to erase the world, a hotel-convent.

A withdrawal and the fear of losing the center

The story begins with an idea that seems like a detail but is instead a poetic declaration: there is an epidemic outside, and a group of notables takes refuge in Zafer’s “hermitage” for spiritual exercises; a sort of Decameron. In there, religion is not just faith, but a language, a grammar, a liturgy that promises absolution – and in the meantime organizes the balance of power.

In this space, Petri builds a domestic theater of command: corridors, rooms, confessionals, common rooms.

Everything is close up, everything is monitored, but suddenly the crimes begin: one after the other, as if someone were playing jenga and removing the lowest pieces. Doubt begins to spread and the question is not “who did it” (even if the tension of the mystery is there): the point is what happens to a ruling class when the collective script is torn.

Volonté and Mastroianni: two ways of leading the room

If the film works as an experiment, it is because Petri places two presences at the center who act as a magnet, two actors with a capital A.

Gian Maria Volonté plays M., “the President”: a man who embodies power as a posture. He doesn’t raise his voice, he rarely speeds up; he always seems a half step ahead of the others, like someone who knows the temperature of the room and knows when to move the air.

Marcello Mastroianni is Don Gaetano, the priest who governs the hermitage: he is not a confessor in the reassuring sense of the term. He is a moral climate director, someone who knows how to make others feel guilty without almost naming their guilt. It doesn’t push you: it directs you. It’s the kind of authority that doesn’t force you, but makes you understand that the obligation already exists.

A perfect choir moves around them for this atmosphere: Mariangela Melato, Michel Piccoli, Ciccio Ingrassia and other faces who seem to carry the weight of the roles even before the lines.

The real “horror” is not the blood, but the order

The film is often brought closer to the grotesque, and the comparison makes sense: Petri is not looking for pure realism, but rather a lens that deforms enough to make his metaphors and Sciascia’s book readable.

But here the grotesque does not serve to make people laugh: it serves to point out the tics, the automatic phrases, the curtsies, the small economy of favors. It’s a black comedy without complacency: it doesn’t do morals, if anything it stages morality as an instrument.

And in fact the most disturbing thing isn’t the murders: it’s the reaction of others.

How silences change. How alliances are redesigned. Just as, even in a place that declares itself a “retreat”, the old invisible direction immediately returns: some speak, some are silent, some are listened to, some are ignored.

The usefulness of “Todo modo”

In the most concrete sense possible, “Todo modo” becomes useful to those who deal with culture: because it is not a “slogan” film, it is a friction film. It forces you to notice how much energy we expend, every day, to function as a presentable version of ourselves — and how much the systems of power expend to remain presentable while they decide.

Morricone

Ennio Morricone’s soundtrack does not accompany: it affects. It’s one of those cases where the music isn’t “beautiful” in the decorative sense; it is precise, sharp, almost a constant pressure. It reminds you that in that place nothing is neutral: not even an intonation.

A film that needed to be seen again

There is also material data that tells the story of the life of this title: “Todo modo” was restored in 2014 by the Cineteca Foundation of Bologna and the National Cinema Museum of Turin, in collaboration with the rights holders and the L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory. This means a very simple thing: the film is shown again as it was, not as we remembered it.

And here we understand a truth that we often forget: an “uncomfortable” work does not live only by what it says, but also by how it can circulate, reappear, be put back into circulation when time is ready to support it without reducing it to a noisy fetish.

Leonardo Sciascia and the hermitage as a narrative trap

Before the film there is the novel. “Todo modo” by Leonardo Sciascia was published in 1974: formally it is a mystery, but its ambition is not the enigma as a game, it is the enigma as an x-ray. The protagonist is a painter (unnamed) who seeks peace and ends up at the Zafer Hermitage, an “unspecified” place transformed into a hotel for spiritual retreats frequented by ministers, managers, men of power.

In the book the hermitage functions like a compression chamber: it brings together people who are used to controlling the outside world and forces them into a closed space, where spirituality risks becoming a management technique. Don Gaetano, here too, is the figure who holds the strings: he is not simply a character, he is a method.

Petri “translates” this narrative trap with an operation that is not scholastic: he takes the structure, bends it, makes it more carnal, more visual, more theatrical. Sciascia works by subtraction and precision; Petri works by pressure and space. But the basic idea remains: when power retreats, it often doesn’t purify itself — it reorganizes.