'The Last One for the Road' and the slow cinema of men who cannot get home

The pitch could be a sketch on a napkin: two older men, a student with a broken heart, and a car pointed at Venice. What Francesco Sossai does with that material in The Last One for the Road is something stranger and more patient than the setup suggests — a film that uses the grammar of the road movie to measure the distance between motion and progress. Released into Italian cinemas in the summer of 2026 and reviewed by the Guardian on 7 July, the picture treats drunkenness not as a punchline but as a long-running condition, the way other films treat grief.

The film is, on its surface, a tragicomedy about a student who hitches a ride with two ageing boozers headed to the lagoon. They bumble. They argue. They drink. They arrive. The pleasures of the picture are not in the destination but in the accumulating texture of the journey, where small kindnesses and small failures alternate without resolving into a lesson. Sossai, working in a register closer to Italian minor-key humanism than to American stoner comedy, lets the camera linger on rooms, on bottles, on the particular weather of a friendship that has outlasted its original reasons.

A road that goes nowhere in particular

The trouble with reviewing the film fairly is that the same qualities that make it distinctive are the ones that will frustrate viewers expecting a payoff. The Guardian's 7 July 2026 notice describes it as "depressing yet funny, faintly baffling" — a useful three-word summary of a picture that refuses the standard consolations of the genre. There is no catharsis waiting in Venice. The student's heartbreak is not healed. The older men's bottles are not emptied in a triumphant last round. The road is not a metaphor for self-discovery; it is a road.

That refusal is the point. Italian tragicomedy has a long lineage — from the post-war neorealists through the work of directors who treated provincial life as a subject rather than a setting — and Sossai clearly knows the inheritance. His characters are not archetypes so much as leftovers: men whose lives have settled into a shape they no longer examine. The student's intrusion does not transform them; it briefly illuminates them, the way a flashlight passed across a window makes the room inside briefly visible before the dark returns.

Counter-narrative: the case for a sturdier drink

The critical case against the film is straightforward and not unfair. At a moment when audiences have grown accustomed to tighter running times and clearer stakes, a picture that ambles — that treats the act of being in a car with two men drinking wine as inherently worth the viewer's hour — asks for a patience many will not extend. The Guardian's reviewer concedes as much in calling the film "faintly baffling." A more sceptical reader might call it indulgent, or worse, inert.

The defence is that the bafflement is the subject. Sossai is making a film about what it feels like to be in a long friendship that has stopped generating reasons to continue but has not stopped continuing. The drink is not a prop for jokes; it is the medium through which two men continue to tolerate each other's company. To demand that the film speed up, or clarify, or deliver a moral at the end, is to demand that it become a different and lesser picture — one about recovery, perhaps, or about the wisdom of quitting, both of which would be easier to write about and easier to dismiss.

The structural frame: minor characters, major running time

What the film is really doing, structurally, is giving screen time to the kinds of figures that prestige cinema usually uses as furniture. The ageing drinker is a stock character in Italian film — a type rather than a person — and Sossai's project is to reverse that compression. He gives the type a past, a kitchen, a preferred brand, a friend he calls only on the days he is too tired to drink alone. The student, by contrast, is the type that gets the close-ups in other directors' films: young, wounded, photogenically adrift. Sossai pushes her to the edge of the frame and keeps the centre on the men.

That inversion is more interesting than the film itself sometimes manages to make use of. There are stretches where the looseness tips into drift, and the viewer begins to feel the weight of the running time without being repaid for it. But the underlying argument — that lives lived in the margins deserve the same duration on screen as lives lived at the centre — is a serious one, and the film makes it more honestly than pictures that arrive at the same conclusion through montage and voiceover.

Stakes: what the picture is competing with

The summer 2026 release calendar is crowded with louder, more easily summarised work, and a tragicomedy about ageing drinkers will not win the box office. What it can do, and what Sossai appears to be aiming at, is stake a claim for a kind of filmmaking that has been gradually pushed to the periphery of the arthouse circuit: slow, regional, uninterested in exportable gags, willing to lose an audience in order to keep faith with a setting. Whether that claim registers beyond the festival-and-critic tier is a question the film's distribution will answer, not the film itself.

For now, The Last One for the Road sits in a useful place: too particular to be a crowd-pleaser, too generous to be a slog, and too honest about its own longueurs to be mistaken for a prestige affectation. It is a picture that asks to be watched at the speed of a long drive, with the windows down, and judged by whether the company was bearable. The company, on balance, is.

Desk note: Monexus framed the picture as a study of duration and inheritance rather than as a traffic report on its plot, on the view that the film itself is its own argument about whose lives get the close-up.