When the 82nd Venice Film Festival opens on August 27 with Paolo Sorrentino’s “La Grazia,” the spotlight will fall on Toni Servillo once again, an actor forever tied to the director’s bittersweet Italian fables. But beyond the red carpet flash of opening night, this year’s lineup carries an unusually charged mix of spectacle and severity: monsters resurrected, prophets reborn, ghosts of politics past, and the bruises of combat both literal and psychological.
The competition field is crowded with auteurs returning with big swings. Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein” stands as the year’s prestige centerpiece: Oscar Isaac takes on Victor Frankenstein, Jacob Elordi embodies his tragic creation, and Mia Goth lends her intensity as Elizabeth. Del Toro’s attraction to gothic fables has never been in doubt, but this time the experiment feels heavier — Venice is giving him its biggest stage, and awards season begins here.
Not far from the Gothic, Yorgos Lanthimos presents “Bugonia”, his surreal remake of the South Korean cult film “Save the Green Planet”. Emma Stone plays a CEO abducted by two conspiracists convinced she is an alien bent on Earth’s destruction. Lanthimos has long thrived on absurd premises that open into moral labyrinths, and Venice audiences will test whether this playful paranoia can match the bite of his earlier festival triumphs.
Amanda Seyfried undergoes her own transformation in Mona Fastvold’s “The Testament of Ann Lee”, the story of the 18th-century Shaker leader proclaimed by followers as the female Christ. Blending music, mysticism and persecution, Fastvold’s film offers Seyfried a role unlike any she has played, and carries echoes of Venice’s fondness for challenging, spiritually charged narratives.
Benny Safdie, breaking from his brother Josh, directs solo for the first time with “The Smashing Machine”, casting Dwayne Johnson as UFC fighter Mark Kerr. Johnson, synonymous with Hollywood heroics, steps into a bruising portrait of addiction, vulnerability and fleeting glory, with Emily Blunt as his wife. The idea of the world’s most bankable action star reinventing himself in a Safdie drama is one of the festival’s curiosities.
Venice thrives on contrasts, and this year’s roster leans heavily into politics. Olivier Assayas adapts Giuliano da Empoli’s bestseller in “The Wizard of the Kremlin”, dramatizing the Kremlin’s corridors of power through a character modeled on Putin’s strategist Vladislav Surkov. François Ozon revisits Camus in “The Stranger”, returning the existentialist’s parable of alienation to the screen after decades. Kathryn Bigelow, absent since “Detroit” in 2017, reemerges with “A House of Dynamite”, set inside the White House during a national security crisis, fronted by Idris Elba and Rebecca Ferguson. Noah Baumbach, meanwhile, sets George Clooney and Adam Sandler adrift in “Jay Kelly”, a road movie of sorts, where an actor and his manager travel through Europe and reflect on fading fame, legacies and friendship.
Jim Jarmusch adds another register with “Father Mother Sister Brother”, a triptych moving from America to Dublin to Paris, starring Cate Blanchett, Adam Driver and Charlotte Rampling. Park Chan-wook stretches into a corporate thriller with “No Other Choice,” adapted from Donald Westlake’s novel “The Ax”, about a desperate manager who hunts down his competitors. Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania delivers perhaps the festival’s most harrowing work with “The Voice of Hind Rajab”, reconstructing the final phone calls of a five-year-old Palestinian girl killed during the Gaza war.
Beyond the Golden Lion competition, the out-of-competition premieres bring glamour, sensation and risk. Luca Guadagnino’s “After the Hunt” casts Julia Roberts as a professor cornered by a student’s accusation, a drama about power and secrets that also gives Roberts her first Venice red carpet. Julian Schnabel’s “In the Hand of Dante” promises excess at 150 minutes, with Oscar Isaac, Gal Gadot, Gerard Butler and Martin Scorsese himself in a story about the Divine Comedy falling into the hands of the mafia. Gus Van Sant dramatizes the Tony Kiritsis hostage crisis of 1977 in “Dead Man’s Wire,” a case that shocked America as it played out live on television. And Sofia Coppola brings a change of pace with “Marc by Sofia,” her portrait of fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
If there is a pattern, it is Venice leaning hard into stories of people fighting impossible battles: a scientist and his creature, a religious visionary, an aging athlete, a child trapped in war, a professor cornered by her past, a man wiring a shotgun to another’s head in desperation. It is as though the festival is staging a confrontation between power and fragility, between obsession and collapse.
Alexander Payne, the two-time Oscar winner, will preside over the international jury that oversees this year’s competition, where monsters, prophets, fighters and visionaries will contend for the Golden Lion.
