There’s No Outrunning What Was Unsaid

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MOVIE REVIEWS
Idda
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Genre: Drama
Year Released: 2026
Runtime: 1h 33m
Director: Irene Dionisio
Writers: Irene Dionisio, Marco Borromei
Cast: Tecla Insolia, Romana Maggiora Vergano, Giuseppe De Domenico
Where to Watch: shown at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival

RAVING REVIEW: We don’t need to experience the eruption of Mount Etna to understand the danger hanging over Adele and Sofia. director/co-writer Irene Dionisio puts an active volcano beneath two women carrying years of resentment, guilt, affection, disappointment, and unfinished conversations, then has the restraint to let most of that “pressure” remain beneath the surface. IDDA builds the story around everything these childhood friends haven't said to each other, and the mountain becomes less a looming threat than a reminder that silence doesn’t mean that nothing is happening beneath the surface.

Adele and Sofia were once inseparable. Now in their thirties and reunited after years apart, they finally plan to do what they dreamed of as children! They decide to climb Mount Etna together to reach its summit. Sofia left Sicily after graduation and built a life elsewhere, free of some of what held her down. Adele stayed behind, setting aside her ambitions of becoming an art photographer and staying connected to the place they both grew up. Their reunion shows that the old connection survived the distance, but Dionisio and co-writer Marco Borromei don't take long to expose the underlying imbalance.

Tecla Insolia plays Adele as the more contained of the two, which makes watching her frustration build so powerful. Adele has become accustomed to Sofia arriving late, changing plans, disappearing, and then trying to reset everything whenever she returns. Romana Maggiora Vergano gives Sofia the kind of warmth that helps explain why Adele has allowed that to continue for so long. She's spontaneous, magnetic, inconsiderate, affectionate, and frustrating enough that all of those things can be true about her at once.

That keeps IDDA from reducing its friendship to the simple question of who wronged whom. Adele has legitimate reasons to feel abandoned, but years of unspoken resentment have also changed the way she simplifies Sofia. Sofia can be selfish without being cruel, while Adele can be justified without always being fair. Neither woman really understands how much the other has changed because both keep reaching for versions of each other from the past.

Their planned climb makes that disconnect physical. What begins as a promise from the past gradually becomes more like a test, and Dionisio lets Etna change around them as their relationship does. Civilization gives way to lava fields, ash, wind, rock, and an increasingly alien-feeling landscape. Cinematographer Gergely Pohárnok often makes the women look almost small against their surroundings. Etna is beautiful enough and intimidating enough without the camera constantly begging us to admire it.

IDDA is at its best when the environment and the relationship are allowed to exist together without Dionisio pushing too hard to explain the connection. These women walk across ground shaped by eruptions while dragging their own past damage behind them, and that's plenty. Some movies would underline that parallel until there was nothing left to discover. Dionisio trusts the audience to make the connection and lets the journey's exhaustion do part of the work.

Giuseppe De Domenico's Salvatore briefly changes the journey when the women encounter him during the climb. His arrival doesn't just create another dramatic obstacle. The interactions around him expose parts of Adele and Sofia that the other may not want to see, and a flirtatious undercurrent adds tension without turning the film into a love triangle. The more interesting intimacy remains between the women themselves. Their closeness comes naturally, making it clear this isn't a friendship the film needs to explain through exposition. Insolia and Vergano convince us they've shared rooms, secrets, arguments, bad decisions, long absences, and reconciliations before we ever met them. That history matters because IDDA eventually asks whether loving someone for a long time is enough to survive realizing you no longer know everything about them.

IDDA isn't only interested in a friendship deteriorating during this hike. Loss hangs over the film in ways that gradually reframe earlier moments, and what initially appears as resentment begins to share space with regret. There are things people don't say because they're angry, things they don't say because they're afraid, and things they assume they'll eventually have another chance to say. The movie understands how those silences feel once another chance isn't guaranteed.

Etna takes on a second function beyond representing suppressed emotion. The volcano is ancient, violent, destructive, and indifferent to the comparatively tiny lives unfolding across it. The film repeatedly contrasts the landscape's permanence with the people's fragility as they walk through it. Adele and Sofia treat certain disagreements as enormous because, to them, they are. Etna doesn't diminish those feelings so much as place them beside something on a completely different scale. Sound plays an equally important role. Wind, footsteps, distant rumbling, silence, and the film's score keep the environment ever-present even when Etna isn't dominating the frame. IDDA wants us listening to the landscape instead of just looking at it.

Dionisio clearly isn't interested in resolving every contradiction, nor should she be, but ambiguity works best when it deepens what we're already feeling. A few parts of the film instead create distance at exactly the moments when I wanted Adele and Sofia to become more accessible. The performances compensate, though the movie doesn't always trust them enough to carry a scene without additional symbolism.

Insolia ultimately becomes the film's emotional center. Adele's need for order initially makes Sofia's unpredictability seem like the obvious source of their problems, but the climb gradually reveals someone struggling with more than a friend's unreliability. Her photography also fits quietly into that characterization. Adele is accustomed to fixing those moments in place even as the people within them keep changing. You can preserve an image. You can't preserve a relationship the same way.

Vergano gets the less sympathetic role and refuses to soften Sofia into an easier-to-process role. She's selfish, but she's also in pain, and the performance becomes deeper and more gratifying as we understand how much information has existed outside Adele's view. The movie needs both women to remain imperfect, because grief would feel cheap if one existed solely to wound the other.

IDDA works better as an emotional experience than a narrative puzzle. The story itself is simple, but Dionisio is interested in the weight people give memories, the durability of childhood friendships, and how certainty about another person can disappear. Its slower moments and overreliance on poetic ambiguity keep it from hitting quite as hard as it could, yet the feeling underneath them is genuine. There’s something almost documentary-like about the story, not just because we’re following this journey, but because we learn about it as we watch along.

The mountain will always be there, even after Adele and Sofia are gone, just as it was there before either of them made their promises. What matters is that they once looked toward it together and imagined reaching the top. IDDA finds both beauty and pain in discovering that some promises outlast the people who made them, and that finishing a journey isn't always the same as getting the ending you wanted.

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[photo courtesy of KINO PRODUZIONI, RAI CINEMA, ANDROMEDA FILM, EFFETTI DIGITALI ITALIANI (EDI), WISE PICTURES, MINISTERO DELLA CULTURA (MIC), IDM SÜDTIROL – ALTO ADIGE FILM FUND, REGIONE PIEMONTE, FILM COMMISSION TORINO-PIEMONTE, CREATIVE EUROPE MEDIA DESK]

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