With Il Mostro, Stefano Sollima brings to Netflix a miniseries that avoids sensationalism to focus on investigations and alternative leads of the Florence case. An accurate, dark and devoid of morbidity story.
They called them “snack buddies“. So the press baptized Pietro Pacciani and his alleged accomplices Mario Vanni And Giancarlo Lottisuspected of being responsible for the eight double murders which terrified Florence between 1968 and the 1985. That grotesque definition was born from a phrase uttered by Vanni in court «I was having snacks with the Paccianis, right?» and quickly entered colloquial Italian, used lightly, but hiding behind those words one horrible story. And it is precisely from that horror that it is born The Monster, the new Netflix series available from October 22nd 2025 with four episodes and directed by Stefano Sollimathe director of the film Subura and series Crime Novel And Gomorrah.
A story that starts from horror, but not from Pacciani
The Monster it does not talk about Pacciani, nor the media trial that marked decades of Italian criminal history. Sollima does not start from the first murder of 21 August 1968, when Barbara Locci (Francesca Olia) And Antonio Lo Bianco (Claudio Vasile) were killed during an intimate moment in their car along a dirt road near Signa: in the back seat there was a six-year-old child, Natalino Mele (Samuel Fantini), Barbara’s son, the only witness. The director decides to start with instead on the night of June 19, 1982from Paolo Mainardi (Riccardo Ardolino) And Antonella Migliorini (Claudia Perossini) reached by gunshots fired by a dark figure. The boy survives and the deputy prosecutor arrives on the scene Silvia Della Monica (Liliana Button) who immediately realizes that the crime must be attributed to the mysterious serial killer known only as The Monster. And here Sollima does one radical choice and decides not to talk about Pacciani and his snack companions, but prefers to concentrate on the alternative investigations, especially this one Sardinian track which led to an endless number of controversial trials: in particular it follows the investigations into the family of Barbara’s husband, Stefano Mele (Marco Bullitta)and their quirks, with stories of intrigue, lovers and illegitimate children.
A mosaic narrative
The editing of the scenes is also strange and may appear out of context to those who watch them, with one backward narrationwhich skips years and then resumes them and which however acquires greater meaning with the succession of episodes. The reconstruction remains accurateas is typical in Sollima’s works, and recovers the newspapers and judicial and procedural documents of the time, and also music such as If by calling of Mina, which form the backdrop to the people’s experiences at the center of events, perhaps unbalancing the story a little too much in favor of the latter to the detriment of the investigations. The photography is then gloomycold, and recreate the atmosphere of the farmhouses and dirt roads between Florence, Signa and Campi Bisenzio, how cold are also the scenes with the bodies of the victims, bloodybut at the same time renouncing any splatter or extremely violent aspect. Because morbidity “risks transforming pain into entertainment” Sollima said, “the horror must be experiencednot bypassed.”
So, that’s four episodes with the Monster that remains in the backgroundand maybe this is a great limitation of the series which was presented as the only and final carleaving a bit of a bad taste in the mouth of those who actually wanted to see The Monster or the story of the snack buddies.
