The first film by Italian director Luca Guadagnino, The Protagonists reveals an interest in exploring the different ways of telling a story, indicative of a writer searching for his artistic vision. Employing a variety of registers, the film is, at times, a documentary about a real-life murder case with witness statements and reconstructions of various events. It is also, however, in part a documentary about the very process of a film shoot, its decisions and rehearsals, leading to in an imagined fiction that aims to depict what happened on the night of the crime. This is an ever-shifting film that, as it passes through the various elements of the mystery, dissolves the boundary between what is real and what is staged — helping to underline not only the melodramatic side of the story, but also its aleatoric character.

Inspired by a real-life murder committed in the streets of London four years before the film was released, The Protagonists follows a film crew shooting a documentary about the case in the city. Two English youths fantasise about committing the perfect crime and, at the end of a night spent in search of a victim, randomly choose a stranger to kill before going on the run. As Tilda Swinton, whose character acts as a narrator guiding us through the revelations regarding both the crime and the film itself, tells us, the two will later be apprehended by the police after one of them confesses.

The relationship between the crime and the mode of storytelling, between reality and representation, is a constant site of tension throughout the film. The various rehearsals of the fatal night and the murder in the car are staged in different manners, often arriving, disturbingly, without much warning — we never know when we will next be “assaulted” by a sudden bloody reconstruction of the crime. A curiosity about the details, about the way the victim was attacked and the injuries inflicted, predicts society’s growing interest in violent crime, anticipating a wave of documentaries and television series over the following years whose morbid interest The Protagonists seems to criticise, yet also cannot help reproducing.

An early line helps to contextualise the interest in this theme: “In the war between good and evil, the viewer almost always roots for the triumph of evil.” This accusation is directed towards a society fascinated by acts of violence, something we are all guilty of, like moths drawn to a flame. Guadagnino dares to push the boundaries between entertainment, faithfulness to the events and respect for the memory of the victims, using a real-life case to deconstruct the possibilities inherent in representations of reality. The way in which the murder is recreated over and over contrasts with the manner in which the actors rehearse and discuss the details of the case in a relaxed atmosphere, disconnected from the violence of the act, as if this emotional distance were necessary for us to deal with the thought that any one of us could have been the victim.

While most documentaries aim for a kind of realism, an illusion that leads us to believe in the truth of what we are watching, here almost all the creative choices (a trial restaged in a garden, a map of the crime scene made out of toys, the constant breaking of the fourth wall as the actors speak to the camera, the bloopers in the final credits) work to emphasise the artificiality of The Protagonists. In one of the most unsettling sequences, Tilda Swinton’s character interviews the widow of the victim, posing trivial questions about her late husband’s likes and dislikes, as if this were the only way to humanise him.

However, it is in the final third of the film that the possibilities of representing reality are taken to the extreme, in a fiction that takes on the contours of a delirious fantasy. As Swinton’s character, made up like the victim and lying in the road as if dead, says: more people stopped in the street to watch the filming, than stopped to notice the dead man in his car. The bright lights of the spectacle attract more attention than reality itself.