TIFF Review: Idda Is a Sour Friendship Drama Short on Insight

Anyone who’s taken a vacation with an old buddy knows it can be a hotbed for resentment, evasion, and antagonism. There’s baggage and jealousy among the best of friends. Italian filmmaker Irene Dionisio mines this fertile territory for her second feature Idda, competing in the Toronto International Film Festival’s newly Oscar-qualifying Platform section. She pairs the retiring, reserved Adele (Tecla Insolia) with the vivacious, outgoing Sofia (Romana Maggiora Vergano) as they fulfill a long-held dream to climb Sicily’s famous Mount Etna (known locally as “Idda”). Recriminations and revelations ensue, making Idda a poisoned, bitterly tinged buddy picture.

Idda begins with Adele, an amateur photographer, wistfully contemplating a set of film negatives. We later realize that it is a flash-forward and the pictures represent her fateful expedition with Sofia, which occupies the bulk of this film. Dionisio introduces fault lines early between the acrimonious thirty-something friends, even before they leave Catania, the childhood hometown from which Sofia eventually moved away. While walking the streets during the festival of Saint Agatha, it is Adele who first strikes up a conversation with Florian, but Sofia who gets with the young man. Sofia and Florian’s beach escapades delay their departure and spark a quarrel between Sofia and Adele before their trek has even begun. Just as the enforced proximity and intimacy of the mountain hike should bring tensions to a boil, Idda loses steam and goes limp-bodied.

The aimlessness of Adele and Sofia’s climb finds an unfortunate analog in Dionisio’s filmmaking and a half-baked script co-written by Marco Borromei. For a premise promising fireworks, the shrug-worthy banality of the revealed “secrets” is dispiriting. The narrative hinges on our understanding of the pain and resentment underpinning its central relationship. But the characters do not acquire an ounce of dimension through their incessant bickering and making up. Dionisio and Borromei do none of the work, conjuring a solid dramaturgical scaffolding to support this supposedly transformative odyssey. The entire enterprise buckles under the weight of portentous images and lava-explosion inserts.

Late in the film, Dionisio attempts to further stir the pot by introducing Salvatore, an old-school friend whom Sofia notes has “got hot.” An amorous threesome notwithstanding, this added point of contention does little to elucidate characters that start and end the picture as ciphers and do not engender any curiosity. To the last, tone remains soporific and sour, and the dialogue, such as there is in this visually oriented film, remains repetitive, unrevealing, without insight.

The languid, travelogue-like footage of Mount Etna is nevertheless arresting and intermittently pleasing. Dionisio has an eye for composition, and Gergely Pohárnok’s cinematography occasionally enlivens a general sense of enervation. The lugubrious pacing and the absence of any narrative momentum make Idda‘s mercifully brief runtime seem longer than it is. The finale, when it does arrive, makes an impression through the music rather than the storytelling, and the climactic song by Matteo Marini and Gabriele Concas is memorable, its melody resonating through the hushed, choral-inflected score as a leitmotif.

Insolia and Vergano are innocent, and the latter in particular tries formulating a complicated figure but has little to do. It isn’t that Idda‘s length is too brief or that the format of two characters chatting doesn’t lend itself to deeper exploration. Several plays and films alike pull off the same feat with considerable success. It’s that Idda stews in a single tonal register for its duration and has none of the gradation of the repeatedly photographed, undulating masses of mist on Mount Etna. Dionisio offers none of the elevation of the setting. Her human characters remain literally and figuratively dwarfed by the towering mountainscapes from the first to the last.

Idda premiered at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival.