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Director: Matteo Garrone

Starring: Marco Macor, Ciro Petrone, Toni Servillo, Salvatore Abruzzese, Salvatore Cantalupo

FILMS about the Mafia are 10 a penny. Good films about the Mafia are in far shorter supply, with the most famous and applauded examples usually focussing on the Italian American organisation - The Godfather, Goodfellas and so on if you need it spelling out.

It is quite possible that the excellent Gomorrah will become a classic Mafia movie of similar standing - it has already won the Grand Prix at Cannes - but it is as radically different from its Hollywood cousins as Leonard Cohen is from Leona Lewis; heartbreak might be a common theme but their style and sound are worlds apart.

The same is true for Gomorrah and its distance from the landmark mob movies that have, until now, defined the genre. Not only is Gomorrah set in Italy, specifically in Naples, but it is stark, brutal and uncompromising where its famed predecessors have been slick and finely polished. It is the vicious and ugly reality to The Godfather’s classy and romantic nostalgia.

The film opens in the harsh blue light of a tanning parlour, where several mobsters are basking under the oppressive blue rays while another has a manicure. These are hoods of the modern age, meterosexual Mafioso whose hands have to look immaculate before they get blood on them. Within minutes the chillingly inevitable executions begin and the bronzing mobsters are left slumped in the sun showers with bullet holes in their heads and necks, the camera panning round to survey the blue-lit carnage to the sound of cheesy Italian pop. We are a long way from emotive classical guitar and soaring orchestral themes, just as we are from the familiar “barbershop hit”.

This is the Mafia of today, and not just any Mafia but the Camorra, Naples’ infamously violent criminal organisation that operates as a series of warring clans rather than in the classical pyramid structure. As the film’s post-script tells us: “In Europe the Camorra has killed more than all other criminal organisations: 4,000 deaths in the last 30 years - one every three days.”

This is the world that Gomorrah presents, though it is not all violence; we are also shown the industrial-scale drug dealing, the infamous waste (mis)management - the pollution from which has had disastrous results on the health of the general population - and the way illegal money is then invested in legitimate business.

Most of all, the film shows us the grip the Camorra has on its society, how even the most well-meaning people are caught up in its merciless tentacles and how it is the expected and accepted career path for many youths.

One reviewer I have read compares the film to acclaimed US TV show The Wire. This might be a little overgenerous (there ain’t much in this world as good as The Wire), but you can see the point he is making.

Much like the TV show, Gomorrah presents a world that seems almost beyond help, where crime is not so much the alternative as the only choice for many young people. Again like The Wire, the film is based on an in-depth journalistic investigation (Roberto Saviano’s best-selling book Gomorrah), and chooses multiple characters to tell its story, rather than a central protagonist.

As such, a distinctive plot is thin on the ground, but the film is packed with striking and memorable scenes - a flash Mercedes ploughing off the road into an ornate classical sculpture garden (it’s, like, totally metaphorical and stuff), or two reckless teens firing rounds into the ocean from a cache of stolen weapons, clad only in their underpants.

My only real gripe would be that such characters don’t have the time to develop and evolve. Unlike The Wire, which has at least 12 one hour episodes in each of its five series, Gomorrah has to pack its narrative into a little over two hours. But my criticism is less an artistic judgement than a personal frustration, as the film consciously chooses to be more interested in society and culture than the individual stories of inhabitants. It is cinema as social study, and uses as many characters as necessary to open a window as wide as possible onto this world.

More than anything - and again like The Wire - Gomorrah tells it like it is. Shot in a handheld, docu-style to terrible Italian pop, the film shuns the conventions of its genre and our well-honed ideas about the mob; Gomorrah’s Mafioso are not husky-voiced family men but poorly dressed thugs, ruling over deprived estates; the many killings are sudden and brutal, the characters disposed of with little fanfare.

It is perhaps best put by a man who used to live in Naples and posted the following comment after a web review of the film: “Those who believe The Godfather is the way of the world in terms of organized crime should see this to get a feeling for what an ugly world it really is. There are no men of honour, just leaders and those who are misled. There is nothing worthwhile in this way of life and the best thing one can do is escape.”

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Did You Know? Journalist and author Robert Saviano, whose 2006 investigation of the Camorra the film is based on, received numerous death threats from the organisation after the book was published. The Italian Minister of the Interior has since granted him a permanent police escort to protect him from assassination.