Among the dystopian ruins of an arid and waterless Rome, among the ancient buildings infested with infecting cockroaches, a crisis that is more human than humanitarian takes shape, over which hover the apocalyptic memories of an all too recent pandemic period (the masks, the - all-round scientists, the prevailing social networks on which to (un)sell oneself). In the new, very lucid film by Paolo Virzì, the precise references to current events are only apparent, however, because the director turns his gaze above all to the past rather than to the future, privileging the pathological nostalgia for what we have never been, imprisoned in the solitudes of a eternities ago.

Drought in fact becomes a choral film of voices that never meet and never really speak to each other. Interlocking stories and characters that never really change the fate of those who experience them. Because in the end we always remain there, always under a now distant time that is not yet dystopian, but equally devoid of hope. Before entering prison, before ending relationships we thought we didn't deserve, carefree times when sleeping wasn't yet an illness. Invasive ghosts who become regular passengers in our dusty taxi. While young people do not feel represented by anything or anyone, for them there has never existed a different world to regret, a nostalgia onto which to project their remorse.

Where Don't Look Up became almost excessive and overflowing in giving an all too rhetorical look at the future that awaits us, Drought instead chooses a sweeter, more empathetic, more wonderfully human and sincere version, always imbued with an absolute dignity that in that arid world there is even more than water.
And so even when the rain finally arrives, spreading into every nook and cranny, it will still be better to go back indoors, sheltered or afloat in the usual comfortable lives of solitude .