‘The Last One For The Road’ review: Francesco Sossai’s bittersweet comedy-drama follows a trio of Italian drinkers

Dir: Francesco Sossai. Italy/Germany. 2025. 100mins

The second feature from Italian-born, German-schooled filmmaker Francesco Sossai follows two 50-something Italian men with little-to-no-money but a shared thirst for alcohol. A love letter to the villages and towns of the wine- and grappa-producing Veneto region around Venice (as is more obvious in the Italian title, which translates to ’cities of the plain’), this comedy-drama has humour, a heart and a melancholic streak. Having premiered in Cannes Un Certain regard, this arthouse drama with crossover appeal has sold widely ahead of its Thessaloniki berth.

A vivid portrait of a place ravaged by time

Carlobianchi (Sergio Romano, Delta) and Doriano (musician and singer-songwriter Pierpaolo Capovilla) don’t just enjoy drinking together; they have a shared history which is slowly uncovered over the course of the film. In their inebriated state, however, it’s hard to tell just how much of the events they reminisce about actually happened. It is clear that the financial crisis of 2008 played a significant role in their lives – there seems to be a clear before and after – and they have a particular fondness for the 1990s. In this, their trajectory mirrors that of their beloved Veneto region, known for its many small and medium-sized businesses, often family-owned, which flourished in the nineties but which did not survive the 2008 crash, leaving entire industrial areas in the region abandoned to this day.

The Last One for the Road is set up as a contemporary picaresque or a modern take on Fellini’s I Vitelloni;  the difference here is that the layabout protagonists who are uncertain about their future or the direction of their life are already middle-aged and with little to no prospects, forever prompting a need to drown their sorrows. The existence of the two has been reduced to crawling from one closing bar to the next, chasing after that illusive last order. 

Just as their well-rehearsed shtick starts to wear thin, the duo encounter Giulio (Filippo Scotti, the lead from Sorrentino’s The Hand of God), a student from Naples who, with his own insecurities and similar down-and-out attitude, seems to be a mini version of the protagonists. The leads take the lad under their wing, and the three start roaming the countryside, falling from one small-scale adventure into another while the more experienced grouches try to instruct their new recruit in the ways of their sad-sack existence.  

The narrative structure is loose-limbed, the characters closer to caricature than to real human beings, and yet there’s a fondness and warmth that comes across as genuine, as well as a hankering for the days when Veneto was a different place. In one of the film’s best sequences, the trio end up at the villa of a Count. The nobleman’s Renaissance garden will be sacrificed for a motorway, prompting the thought that, soon, Veneto will be filled with roads to places you can’t visit anymore because they’ve been destroyed by the very roads erected to get there.

This particular tone of melancholy, frustration with and incomprehension of the modern age permeates the proceedings. Sossai, who wrote the screenplay with Adriano Candiago, highlights a few of the beautiful places still left int the region, but mostly the film is interested in the ugly or everyday places in between.  

As the story travels from bittersweet to comic and back again, The Last One for the Road never feels like it explores new territory in terms of its characters and situations. But the specific setting both in time and place make it a very vivid portrait of a place ravaged, like its characters, by time, but hopeful that one last drink might enable things to be seen in a more positive light.