The Kingdom: coming-of-age meets crime drama in this thoughtful Corsican thriller

The obsessive business of hunting (and being hunted) dominates this tight, muscular Corsican thriller from the off. Carefully field-dressing a newly caught boar for a family feast, 15-year-old Lesia (a sharp-eyed Ghjuvanna Benedetti) hunts solely to please Pierre-Paul (Saveriu Santucci), the fugitive mobster father she hardly knows. But both become prey when a ‘clan’ war breaks out during one of Lesia’s rare covert visits with ‘P-P’ and his gang, and her beach-and-boyfriend preoccupations dissolve in the scramble to stay alive.

First-time director Julien Colonna mixes the ‘crime family’ tropes of films like Animal Kingdom (2010) with a thoughtful coming-of-age theme. Assuming Lesia’s POV throughout, his direction has a watchful feel, packed with spying long shots as she strains to work out her father’s plans, alongside an eavesdropper’s soundtrack full of male murmurs and TV news bulletin hints. As intrigued as the sidelined Lesia, the viewer must piece together what political car bombings, and the drive-by killing of P-P’s lieutenant presage for the gang. Carefully filtering everything through Lesia’s brave, callow curiosity (no Godfather-style explanations of ‘our business’) Colonna’s script (co-written with Jeanne Herry) feels fresh, a teen’s anxious, half-comprehending take on gang warfare.

A Corsican native, Colonna brings understated historical and social authenticity to the drama (there was indeed a 1995 mob war). Cast with local non-professional actors and spattered with local Corsu dialect, the film captures the harshly beautiful landscape without fuss, from sweaty tourist-packed resorts to remote mountain hideouts. But as P-P and Lesia draw closer in a welter of tit-for-tat killings and near-miss escapes, the script occasionally romanticises Corsican vendetta culture (a taut sequence intercutting a mob hit and a boar hunt ends in teary hugging soundtracked by a vintage Tino Rossi ballad). Even P-P’s rueful defence of revenge killings to Lesia seems like a nostalgic rationalisation: “Young men’s anger – the whole of history is based on it.”

Colonna paces it with thrilling confidence, his narrative all low-key watching in its first half and remarkably businesslike ‘whacking’ in the second, which ratchets up the tension by picking off P-P’s clan until Lesia must stick or quit. The film is sustained by Benedetti’s marvellous, vigilant performance, sliding from sullen teen to vital sidekick, but the calm and charismatic Santucci, also a non-pro actor, more than holds his own. Their tender onscreen chemistry brings home the emotional cost and precarity of these outsider lives, the sins of the fathers extracting a fierce price from their children.

► The Kingdom is in UK cinemas from 8 August.