Somebody to Love (2025)

Original title: Follemente

Paolo Genovese’s Somebody to Love takes a swing at something audacious: it wants to show us what actually happens inside people’s heads during a first date. Not the sanitised version. The real carnival of competing impulses, second-guessing, and internal panic. He borrows liberally from Pixar’s Inside Out playbook, giving each of his two protagonists four distinct inner voices that debate every conversational choice like a committee designing a camel. It’s an ambitious framework. Sometimes it works beautifully. Other times you wish someone had edited the committee down.

The surface plot couldn’t be simpler. Piero (Edoardo Leo), a recently divorced philosophy professor with a young son, shows up for dinner at Lara’s apartment. Lara (Pilar Fogliati) restores furniture for a living and has just extricated herself from yet another relationship with an unavailable man. Both have baggage. Both want connection but fear it in roughly equal measure. What follows is an evening that oscillates between genuine warmth and excruciating awkwardness, the kind where you’re never quite sure if things are going well or catastrophically badly.

Where Genovese earns his keep is in understanding that modern dating is less about finding perfection than about negotiating acceptable levels of mutual dysfunction. Piero and Lara aren’t looking for soulmates, exactly. They’re looking for someone who won’t run screaming when the facade inevitably cracks. The film’s split-screen approach, cutting between the date and the duelling voices in each person’s mind, turns this anxiety into something visible. You watch them trying to calibrate their responses in real time, attempting to be interesting but not strange, vulnerable but not needy, authentic but not too authentic. It’s exhausting just watching it, which is rather the point.

The four-voice structure, though, creates its own problems. Eight distinct personalities means a lot of screen time devoted to internal debate, and after a while the voices start bleeding together. You lose track of which one represents logic versus impulse versus romanticism. I suspect three per character would have been cleaner. The film occasionally feels like it’s working too hard to justify its own concept, as if Genovese isn’t quite confident that the basic situation is interesting enough. Which it is, when he gets out of its way.

Leo and Fogliati handle the tonal tightrope impressively. They have to play people who are simultaneously attracted and uncertain, hopeful and guarded, genuine and performative. Often within the same scene. Both actors manage this without making their characters seem unstable or incoherent, which is no small feat. The ensemble voicing the internal characters brings necessary comic energy, though they’re hamstrung somewhat by having to represent abstract concepts rather than fully realised people.

There’s something quietly radical, in my view, about a romantic comedy that treats emotional honesty as genuinely risky rather than as a guaranteed path to connection. Most films in this genre assume that vulnerability equals virtue, that opening up will be rewarded. Genovese knows better. Piero and Lara risk authenticity not because it guarantees success but because the alternative, performing an idealised version of themselves indefinitely, is spiritually deadening. The relief on their faces when they discover the other person isn’t running for the exit after a moment of unfiltered truth is palpable. And earned.

The film became Italy’s highest-grossing release of 2025, which tells you something about how well Genovese threaded the needle between conceptual ambition and emotional accessibility. Audiences responded to something here, despite the occasionally cluttered execution. Perhaps it’s the recognition factor. Everyone who has ever been on a first date knows that feeling of your brain running six conversations simultaneously while trying to appear calm and collected. Genovese just makes the usually invisible visible.

The soundtrack does some heavy lifting, moving between classical pieces and contemporary pop with more grace than you’d expect. The use of Queen’s title track at a particularly intimate moment walks the line between humour and genuine emotion, which could have been disastrous but somehow isn’t. Credit to Genovese for understanding that comedy and feeling aren’t mutually exclusive.

What Somebody to Love understands, fundamentally, is that romantic connection isn’t about finding someone who fits your imagined ideal. It’s about finding someone whose particular brand of chaos doesn’t drive you insane. Someone whose internal committee, when it finally stops arguing with itself, reaches roughly the same conclusions as yours. The film gets tangled in its own machinery at times, loses momentum in the middle section, and probably could have been trimmed by ten minutes. But when it connects, it does so with something approaching genuine insight. For a romantic comedy willing to treat first-date anxiety as something more than a cute obstacle to overcome, that counts for something.