Cannes Review: Heads or Tails is an Ethereal, Lived-In Western

I could name few living filmmakers better equipped for the Western than Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis. The duo behind The Tale of King Crab––a film I revere like a sacred relic––have created their own niche in contemporary Italian magical realism, somewhere adjacent to Alice Rohrwacher and Pietro Marcello while very much its […] The post Cannes Review: Heads or Tails is an Ethereal, Lived-In Western first appeared on The Film Stage.

May 23, 2025 - 06:35

Cannes Review: Heads or Tails is an Ethereal, Lived-In Western

I could name few living filmmakers better equipped for the Western than Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis. The duo behind The Tale of King Crab––a film I revere like a sacred relic––have created their own niche in contemporary Italian magical realism, somewhere adjacent to Alice Rohrwacher and Pietro Marcello while very much its own thing. Their latest is called Heads or Tails and it’s another of the filmmakers’ ethereal campfire stories. If perhaps not the fullest realization of their Western potential, it will certainly do until that gets here.

Heads or Tails concerns Rosa (Nadia Tereszkiewicz), the intrepid wife of a wealthy and domineering landowner. It begins at the rodeo, where a kind of Vegas-era Buffalo Bill (John C. Reilly––yes, that one) has come to town to tour his show. While charming the local dignitaries, he proposes a competition between his American riders and the local Italians, with the instruction to “lasso, subdue, and saddle.” Santino (Alessandro Borghi), a handsome Italian, enters and wins but ends up behind bars, prompting a newly smitten Rosa to break him out and killing her husband in the process. Soon, a price is on their head and they’re on the run with Bill and his sidekick on the chase.

With King Crab, de Righi and Zoppis constructed a world that felt ornate but unmistakably lived-in, a trick they repeat again here, achieving the unlikely (and increasingly sought-after) effect of feeling like you’re watching something much older. In the unlikely event that someone ever comes across Heads or Tails while flicking through the channels, they would be forgiven for thinking it’s anything but the genuine article. The rodeo scene at the beginning and a gun fight later on feel particularly period-accurate to mid-20th-century cinema (and a nice example of talented filmmakers being given a little more budget) without suggesting homage or historical reconstruction. I particularly liked the smoky nighttime sequences in the train yard and a miraculous moment, one morning, when our hero awakens to discover a group of older villagers hunting for frogs.

It’s another gorgeous demonstration of craft, a film to ease into, even if it never quite musters Crab‘s sense of dramatic stakes and momentum. The plot features guns and romance, a dead body, an angry Marquis, and a band of Argentinian revolutionaries; yet Reilly’s Bill (a slightly jarring presence at first but ultimately charming) is a largely benevolent antagonist and there is little jeopardy in the chase, no bite of imminent danger, and we are given no shining El Dorado, literally or figuratively, for our heroes to find. When a more threatening foe eventually arrives, it’s a little late in the game. I must admit there were times my mind began to wander.

The story (credited both to the filmmakers and Carlo Salsa) is told through Bill’s dime-store writing, a framing device that divides Heads or Tails into chapters while approaching a larger point about owning one’s narrative, but it’s mostly peripheral. Come for the trainyard and the shootout and the still-chatty (albeit decapitated) head, and best of all, the way cinematographer Simone D’Arcangelo (King Crab, The Settlers) captures the sunlight in Rosa’s curly hair. Now that’s cinema.

Heads or Tails premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival.

The post Cannes Review: Heads or Tails is an Ethereal, Lived-In Western first appeared on The Film Stage.