This family drama ia set in the 1970s in a modern suburban high rise, where Penelope Cruz takes on the role of a suppressed maternal figure Clara, an incredibly attractive Spanish woman married to a well-to-do, cheating, and abusive Italian husband (Vincenzo Amato) with three kids.

Director Emanuele Crialese inserts an autobiographical stand reflecting his own experiences as a trans person, visualised in the family’s eldest Adri/Adriana (an effervescent Luana Giuliani), as a 12-year-old girl, who now wishes to live her life as a boy. This is some feet for Crialese, considering he grew up at a time with much less, if any, trans-awareness, and the immense adversity he would have encountered. Adri’s boyishness is predictably scolded by her domineering father. Yet Clara, however clumsily and sometimes reluctantly, wants to understand and support, but her child’s gender dysphoria ultimately becomes another bone of contention in her marriage’s decline.

Over the course of a summer, a travelling working community occupies a makeshift campsite hidden amongst the reeds. This is where Adri meets Sara (Penelope Nieto Conti), where an ever so slight romantic dalliance ensues. There is an inclination that Sara knows about Adri’s transsexuality and discreetly accepts it. Yet the film doesn’t particularly dwell on this connection for too long, as when the community (along with Sara) abruptly disappears there is no sense of tragic loss. By that point, the narrative has become fully absorbed by the Clara’s nervous breakdown, and the dire situation at home.

The visuals are slick and polished, incorporating baroque embellishments of the ’70s fused with period Italian design. The retro-future, garish building in which the family inhabit is stylistically reminiscent of Ben Wheatley’s dystopian thriller High Rise (2015), set in the same decade. Clara is elegantly decked out in the upmarket fashions of the time, more in the vein of Sophia Loren or Gina Lollobrigida than a dowdy housewife on the brink of emotional collapse. Even in the most painful of moments, whether it’s protecting her children from their father’s beatings, confronting her husband’s pregnant secretary to fending off his rape advances; she looks ravishingly radiant in each frame.

Cruz injects a certain melodrama and vulnerability to Clara that only an actress like her with such a striking physicality and presence can pull off even in a rather crammed and weak script. Looking almost otherworldly, Cruz naturally draws all the attention, inadvertently sucking the air out for any other plot or character development, with storylines such as Adri’s not reaching their full impact. As a result, the movie fails to elicit emotion.

Clara’s emotional collapse, the father’s violent behaviour and the children’s reactionary misconduct are clumsily contrasted against a upbeat Italian summer vibe: a picturesque holiday with a large extended family, an elaborate stuffy upper-class dinner, or a glamorous, headscarf-clad Clara driving a convertible through the streets of Rome. It feels a little derivative, all but disconnected from the narrative. It’s almost as if the directors wanted to pay tribute to Italian family classics such as Federico Fellini’s Roma (1970) or Paolo Sorrentino’s more recent The Hand of God (2021). It doesn’t work.

Undoubtedly, the film is merited because of this delicate depiction of the trans experience, and Giuliani does a stellar job of capturing Adri’s innate disposition and yearning, and her childlike contemplations on alienation seem accurate for the time. Yet there is a nagging sensation that this poignant trans story could have been a standalone film, rather an addition to spice up an otherwise traditional story of familial discontent.

The Immensity is in cinemas on Friday, August 11th. On VoD on Monday, October 2nd.