As would befit a bare-all portrait of Naple’s almighty Camorra crime family, Gomorrah opens in the 21st century’s Roman bath: A health spa. Like its ancient analog, near-nude men engage in the usual gab, basking in blue, ultraviolet rays all the while. The image-keeping session, however, is abruptly interrupted when anonymous men burst into the facility to execute a vicious hit. This ultraviolent sequence—with its looping trance soundtrack and without a who or why—is disquieting and delivers Matteo Garrone’s first, very visceral shake-up of cinema’s tendency to mythologize All Things Gangsta. For 135 shadowy minutes, Garrone repeatedly stuns the unsuspecting eyes with these brusque pops from the cusp of the frame, each without Hollywood’s nerve-easing pizzazz. By doing so, the Italian director offers an on-the-money simulation of the Camorra’s invisible yet all-seeing position.
    
For these poor Neapolitan denizens then, a word like equipoise is only for the folks in Oxford. With billions of Euros at stake and a corrupting influence that snakes through every industry from fashion to waste management, fear of the Camorra is not just a FDR-dismissed abstraction, but, like nearby Vesuvius, a palpable threat waiting to erupt. In fact, 4,000 murders have been tallied by the mob since the ‘70s—far more than notorious bloodletters like the IRA and Cosa Nostra. With its tumbledown purlieus and dilapidated apartment complexes, this modern-day Gomorrah—destroyed not by God, but by gunfire and brimming drugs—stinks of sic transit gloria and is anchored by an inescapable feudal hierarchy: everyone, from grocer to goon, is a pawn in the mob’s centuries-old machinations. Born into this systematic quicksand, nobody moves for fear of hastening death.

Garlanded with the Grand Prix at last year’s Cannes, this startlingly bleak adaptation of Roberto Saviano’s best-selling exposé on the Camorra’s ineluctable activities (both legal and illegal) is remarkable for how effortlessly Garrone threads the five, united-we-stand-for-Naples stories into a j’accuse rap sheet. From youngest to oldest, the hydra-headed narrative tracks a wide-eyed 13-year old looking for acceptance, two aspiring and trigger-happy Scarfaces, a desperate college graduate working for a Machiavellian businessman, an unappreciated prêt-à-porter tailor who dangerously outsources his talents to Chinese competitors, and an elder money-runner caught in a cutthroat power struggle. Even if the characters come across as representatives from a desired demographic rather than complex protagonists, the cast’s excellent, true-to-life performances lend an immediacy and totemic weight to the often shocking on-screen incidents. Taken alone, each segment feels blinkered; stacked, they form a devastating symbol of resignation to a faceless, iron-fisted regime.