Piranhas

Cert TBC; digital download from July 13

The second film this week to look at the path young men take to crime is Naples-based and is directed by Claudio Giovannesi, who cowrote the screenplay with Roberto Saviano, on whose novel it is based.

The novel is in turn based loosely on a real-life Naples teenager, and the film is told with an unnerving matter-of-factness. It’s a coming-ofage, rites-of-teenage-passage story where the stakes are lethal.

Fifteen-year-old Nicola dislikes the way the newest ‘family’ is running his area so, after a short criminal internship where he learns exactly how lucrative it can be, he takes advantage of a power vacuum and fills the gap with his friends. Their youth is evident but ambiguous until they celebrate their first success, and in doing what they perceive to be adult, they look all the more like children.

Saviano wrote the novel that became a film, and a series, Gomorrah, a look at the Camorra that got him death threats. This film isn’t quite as good, not quite as full, but it is like a prequel.

It explains how teenage boys in particular are vulnerable when they grow up in an area where there is little opportunity and the most successful people they see are criminals.

It might be set in Naples, but that truth is universal.