Any vestige of romanticism about the mob is stripped away in about two minutes in Gomorrah, the rest of the 137 minute running time reinforces with extreme severity that it does not feel good to be a gangster, and is, in fact, rather soul destroying. Directed by Matteo Garrone, Gomorrah is based on the book by Roberto Saviano, which deals with crime and the Camorra in Naples and Caserta. To put things in perspective, so visceral was Saviano’s work that he’s been threatened by several Italian “godfathers” and has been granted a permanent police escort by Italian authorities.

Seeing Gomorrah it’s not hard understanding why. There are no real good guys, just bad guys and not so bad guys. People, who are either victims or the victimized, all caught in a vicious cycle of violence and crime. The plot trades back and forth between five different stories from the frontlines of the mob wars and shakedowns and dirty deeds. On the one hand the minutia of daily criminality is shown in all its non-glory, but underneath there is always an undercurrent of possible death or dismemberment. Sudden bursts of extreme violence punctuate the fractured cityscape, and even when you’re expecting it, you’re not expecting it.

The stories run the gamut: from veterans sick of the game, to wannabes trying prove themselves to folks just trying to get by much to the Mob’s discontent. Don Ciro (Gianfelice Imparato) is a middle-manager caught up in rivals’ revenge plans against his clan. Totò (Nicoló Manta) is a 13-year-old grocery delivery boy that’s initiated into a gang after returning some of their wayward property (ie: a gun and some drugs). Roberto (Carmine Paternoster) is put to work for another crime family, assisting in the illegal dumping of barrels filled with chemicals in an abandoned quarry. Pasquale (Salvatore Cantalupo) is an haute couture tailor who works overnight training Chinese garment workers, putting his life endanger because these firms are a threat to the Camorra’s stake in the industry. And Marco (Marco Macor) and Ciro (Ciro Petrone) are a pair of young thugs that want to grow up to be Tony Montana.

Marco and Ciro are really the only two characters that carry Hollywood delusions about the mob; they steal guns, strip to their undies and fire wildly at debris in a nearby swamp. At the heart of a lot of mob movies, no matter who realistic they are, is that there’s a certain degree of fantasy to them. A kind of wish fulfillment to being the good old boy kind of outlaw that’s as good as any law abiding citizen, but just plays by a different rule book. The violence in Gomorrah though is raw and cutting. Good people can die as horribly as the bad, and if you should happen to be a person of conscience, and you get involved in the mob, things are definitely going to go from bad to worse for you.

Shot in a very documentary style that puts intimacy with the characters over lavish production values, Garrone puts us right in the centre of the action both in terms of camera placement and where he delivers us into the narrative. It’s dirty, it’s gritty, it’s imperfect and it’s without pity. Stylish without drawing attention to itself, and engrossing without losing it’s clinical detachment, Gomorrah is a powerful work that almost transcends genre and stands on its own thanks to a certain quality of uniqueness. There’s never been a mob movie like it, and you’ll probably never look at mob movies of the past in the same way again.