Stars: 2/5

“On My Skin,” based on the real death of 31 year-old Italian Stefano Cucchi, did exactly what it set out to do. It drew attention to the last seven days of Cucchi’s life and his journey from a close-to-normal life to the grave.

The movie was an incredibly slow march to the finish. He’s arrested for possession of drugs, beaten, humiliated, then proceeds to rot in a series of different dark rooms. The whole time he’s caught between telling the truth and suffering in silence just because it’s easier.

“On My Skin” is simply torturous to watch. At first it seems like Cucchi’s got something good going on, but then we find out he’s a recovering addict who’s relapsed while maintaining the facade of normalcy. I was sorely mistaken in thinking “On My Skin” was going to be about drug addiction.

As “On My Skin” crawled forward I couldn’t help but feel sick to my stomach. Cucchi only gets more and more pitiful, and throughout the seven days he spends incarcerated his family barely gets to see him. It seemed voyeuristic to watch a man as he creeped closer to death while surrounded by perfect strangers.

The whole time Cucchi worries about his case and avoiding the conflict implicating his arresting officers on his injuries would make. It’s frustratingly human, and all too real for a movie. He’s so beaten down that all he wants is a little peace.

I don’t think this needed to be a movie — maybe a documentary, but definitely not a drama. This is someone’s death, and a plot needs more than just a beginning, middle and end. Most movies based on a true story embellish things to make them more interesting because people’s lives aren’t stories.

I respect the purpose of raising awareness of the issue of mysterious deaths in Italian prisons, but people’s lives aren’t stories. A bad death doesn’t necessarily make for a good story. It’s just something that shouldn’t have happened.

A documentary would have been infinitely more appropriate because way more information about the issue could have been presented, and audiences could really start to build an understanding of the issue. I didn’t know until the end of the film that Cucchi’s death was symptomatic of something even bigger going on. Had “On My Skin” been a documentary I would know a lot more than I found out from a couple minutes of Googling.

All of the work that went into “On My Skin” was great. I mean, it was Netflix production quality, so I wouldn’t have expected anything less. However, the story was lacking no matter how you look at it. The last days of Stefano Cucchi definitely deserve to be known about, but would have been more impactful in a focused documentary on the larger issue at hand.