‘Mussolini’ Review on MUBI: You Can’t Look Away

Spoilers follow for Italian history and the series Mussolini: Son of the Century through “Chapter 5,” which premiered on MUBI on Wednesday, October 1.

Give Joe Wright the opportunity to do whatever he wants, and he will do whatever he wants , like set his adaptation of Anna Karenina primarily in a rundown theater or have Blackbeard’s pirates sing Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in Pan . Wright’s tendency as a director to point out the artifice of what he’s doing, then use our awareness of said artifice to emphasize how all of us, all the time, are performing for an audience, is a perfect fit for a story about politics and the people who wield ideologies as lure and cudgel. In Mussolini: Son of the Century , Wright has created a deliriously experimental series about a monst