Caravaggio's Shadow

Caravaggio's Shadow (L'ombra di Caravaggio, 2022) is Michele Placido's historical drama you can watch online on iFILM. Riccardo Scamarcio plays the rebellious painter, with Louis Garrel and Isabelle Huppert alongside him.

After Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio kills a rival in a duel and ends up sentenced to death, he flees Rome and heads south. Pope Paul V can't decide whether to pardon the genius. To help him choose, the Church sends a secret investigator after the artist — a nameless figure known only as the Shadow (Louis Garrel) who trails the master, interrogates his models and lovers, and gathers evidence. And the evidence unsettles Rome: for his sacred scenes Caravaggio recruits beggars, prostitutes and thieves off the street, and the saints on his canvases come out far too earthly for the Vatican's taste.

Placido shoots the biography like a noir investigation, the screen's own light and shadow echoing Caravaggio's brushwork. Scamarcio's painter is hot-tempered, hard-drinking and dangerous, stripped of the textbook gloss. It's a film for anyone who likes costume dramas about art and power painted in dark colors. Stream Caravaggio's Shadow (2022) online on iFILM.