Parthenope

Parthenope (2024) is a Paolo Sorrentino drama you can watch online on iFILM. A girl is born in the Tyrrhenian Sea off Naples in 1950 and named Parthenope, after the siren whose name the city itself once carried.

What follows spans roughly fifty years of her life, filmed like one endless Mediterranean summer. Dazzlingly beautiful, Parthenope drifts through lovers and passions: she flirts with acting, commits seriously to anthropology, dances until dawn, and turns the head of nearly everyone she meets. But the beauty keeps a ledger — it opens every door and quietly hollows things out. Shadowing her radiant years is the suicide of her brother Raffaele, who seemed to dissolve in his sister's glare. This isn't plot in the usual sense so much as a procession of encounters, faces, and Neapolitan tableaux through which she tries to grasp who she has actually been.

Newcomer Celeste Dalla Porta holds nearly every frame, with Gary Oldman appearing as the writer John Cheever and Silvio Orlando in support. Sorrentino offers a sensual, melancholy love letter to his native Naples, made for viewers happy to sit with beauty rather than a tidy story. Watch Parthenope online on iFILM.