If you liked it Squid Gameadoreete The Tenth Victim: it is an Italian film that was released on December 1, 1965. At the time it was not a great success, but it was then considered “brilliant”, “Prophetic”, “kitsch at the right point”, “a film that had already understood everything about today’s society” and also “the Italian Hunger games of the 60s“.
The film is signed by Elio Petri, director of some masterpieces of our cinema. This is from a short science fiction story (The seventh victim, by Robert Sheckley) from which Petri, with the help of two screenwriters of the caliber of Tonino Guerra and Ennio Flaiano, made a dystopian film with a stellar cast: Marcello Mastroianni (oxygenated), Ursula Andress, Elsa Martinelli. The story takes place in Rome in the then distant 2000 when to ward off aggression between humans, a competition was established on a global level (called The Great Hunt) which confers participants license to kill. A computer forms pairs of participants by assigning the role of hunter or victim and the game begins.
The film tells the events that should lead Ursula Andress to kill the tenth victim, Marcello Mastroianni, in the most spectacular way possible, at the Roman Forum, to please the television crew that follows it and the sponsors of the program. The film is a ferocious social critique of the mechanisms that turn people into numbers and the dangerous role of what would become reality shows. The ending is instead of an Italian comedy. Online it has been written that Petri had another one in mind, but who succumbed to pressure from the producer who wanted something in line with Italian comedy. The film has recently been restored and you can see it on different platforms.
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