Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Turning Point’ on Netflix, an Italian Odd-Couple Gangster-Drama That Wiggles Between Genres

Netflix’s The Turning Point – La Svolta – attempts to marry two genres: the unlikely-buddy comedy and the scowling-gangster-drama. It kind of comes off as a B-grade Frank Grillo vehicle with a Judd Apatowian bent, with maybe a Coen Bros.-esque doomed-kidnapping plot thrown in. Seems ambitious, but movies like this tend to be either misshapen messes or pleasant surprises. Let’s see where this one lands.

THE TURNING POINT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Ludovico (Brando Pacitto) has a pretty nice condo – spacious, tall ceilings, built-ins, not too old nor too new; I notice these things – but it’s slowly going to pot. He’s just not taking care of it. And his dad, even though he doesn’t live there, busts Ludo’s ass about not doing the dishes and whatnot, and gets on his case for leaving college and wasting his time drawing comics. There’s a reason for this perceived slackerdom: Ludo’s in the throes of a yearlong depression. He’s withdrawn, insecure, prone to anxiety attacks. He’s in his 20s, wears a knit beanie over his light case of male pattern baldness and watches from afar as his attractive female neighbor has it out with her jerk boyfriend. That’s an opening, maybe, but he surely feels that he’s incapable of moving through it.

Elsewhere, a sweaty motorcycle man pulls up to a bar with a backpack, and it’s clear there’s something important in it. Before he can even say “Gimme a beer” to the bartender without specifying which beer, like they always do in the movies, another different motorcycle man does the ol’ snatch-and-dash with the backpack. He’s out the door, on his bike, pursued by the first motorcycle man until he crashes and hides behind a dumpster. This is Jack (Andrea Lattanzi), career thief, and lucky for him, Ludo is finally at long last taking out the trash. That’s an opening, and Jack is not one to ignore such opportunities: He forces Ludo at gunpoint to hide him in his apartment.

This, as they say, is the beginning of a bee-yoo-tiful friendship. It’s rocky at first, considering how Ludo has a panic attack on the way up the steps, as anyone who’s not used to having a gun pointed at them might. Jack isn’t particularly nice, but at least he helps Ludo take the medication he needs to calm himself. Of course, the backpack is full of money. WHAT KIND OF MONEY, you might ask if your name is Lisa (as in “you’re tearing me apart, Lisa”), and the answer is, the kind of money that has a mob boss sending his A-gamer goons to get it back by any means necessary.

It isn’t long before Jack and Ludo warm to each other, the former seeing the latter as a kind of assertiveness-training project: Get him to stop being indecisive, try to do what he loves for a living, ask Rebecca (Ludovica Martino) upstairs out, etc. They end up being kind of like brothers or besties. Jack fixes some of the broken stuff around the apartment; they chat up Rebecca and her Spanish roommate (Chabeli Sastre Gonzalez); they smoke weed and have deep convos. Too bad they can’t leave the apartment, because swarms of thugs out there are just waiting to kill the shit out of Jack and anyone who might be associated with him. This is what you might call a major problem.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Turning Point is a modern-emo crime-drama heavily influenced by Pulp Fiction: You’ve got the relative morality of crooks, gangsters gossiping like scamps in a sewing circle, an inside-the-trunk shot, a villain who likes to give cold hard speeches before he offs an MFer, and a MacGuffin inside a thing with a handle on it.

Performance Worth Watching: Pacitto and Lattanzi stand on equal footing here, playing nicely rendered dramatic foils who find friendship in an unlikely situation.

Memorable Dialogue: Jack addresses the isolation Ludo feels: “You don’t have to feel alone. Humanity is alone. It’s not easy for anyone.”

Sex and Skin: Turns out the young Spanish lady has no issues with nudity, because she’s superfluously unclothed when she asks Ludo to help her with her plumbing. (That’s a literal description, but it’s completely understandable if you take it as a double-entendre.)

Our Take: File The Turning Point under pleasant surprise. It’s nothing earth-shattering, just a mediumweight drama with a few comedic touches and likable chemistry between its two leads. I’m not sure the premise is wholly plausible (seems like it would be harder, and take longer, to forgive a guy who’s put a gun in your face), and it follows some familiar tropes with the supporting cast (the women upstairs are thinly rendered, the bad guys are colorful psychos), but it mostly goes down easy (bummer about that ending, though).

Director Riccardo Antonaroli cultivates plenty of goodwill between the Jack and Ludo characters, and refuses to let them exist as stereotypes. The screenplay takes Ludo’s psychological struggles seriously, elevating him above typical pathetic loserdom; and Jack shows some sensitivity not just by offering Ludo a 5k Euro payment for letting him crash there, but showing him a little brotherly love of the type he lost many years prior. The movie isn’t going to change the way we think about mental illness or kidnapper-abductee relationships, but it shows a willingness to step outside the usual boundaries of similar genre pictures.

Our Call: STREAM IT (but keep your expectations modest). The Turning Point is an agreeably watchable 95 minutes, which is far more than can be said about many, many movies.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.