TORONTO – With season two of “Everything Calls for Salvation” now on Netflix, new viewers might be inclined to explore Writer Daniele Mencarelli’s brilliant work. The series is semi-autobiographical, and based off of Mencarelli’s book of the same name – which is part of a trilogy of novels. His first novel, The House of Gazes, was written in 2018 and won the Volponi and Severino Cesari literary prizes. 

Mencarelli’s third and latest novel written in 2022, Sempre Tornare, was nominated for the European Union Prize for Literature. But it was Mencarelli’s second novel, Everything Calls for Salvation that earned him recognition from Strega – Italy’s top literary prize – for which he was a finalist.

The novel even went on to win the Strega Giovani Award, a subcategory of Strega judged by teenagers aged 16 to 18, from over 100 secondary schools in Italy and abroad. The soaring popularity and [unfortunate] relatability of its subject matter caught the eye of Netflix Executives who purchased the TV rights – and the rest, a wonderfully acted and deservedly acclaimed series, was history.

Readers, and now also viewers of the Netflix series, have found themselves glued to the sorrowful reveries of a patient who is admitted to a psychiatric hospital for a week of involuntary treatment and diagnosis. The story’s details unravel slowly, first introducing its enervated main character Daniele (played by Federico Cesari), a young air conditioning salesman who after a night of partying wakes up in an enclosure bed at a mental ward.

The viewer inevitably adopts Daniele’s confusion as their own, a perfect device to explore the whys and wherefores of his interior world, aided of course by his agonizingly depressed yet insightful narration. “I can’t even open my eyes or ask for help. How come no one sees that we are as light as feathers. A breath of wind is enough to blow us away. What the f*ck is this all for?” It’s mostly a true story.

In his twenties, Mencarelli survived a violent psychotic break after being hospitalized for a week. The book is dedicated to the “madmen of all times, swallowed up by the asylums of history”, but also to the doctors “who put science in the hands of love”.

The hook of course is in discovering precisely why Daniele has been admitted to the hospital, as his memory of the event is initially foggy. Fans of the work gravitate to Daniele’s philosophical outcries on life, his condemnation of what he perceives as a meaningless existence – predicated on the social injustice he observes around him. If he’s deeply depressed, as a team of doctors initially suggest, then his depression appears to be rooted in over-empathy.

When asked if playing the character had left an impression on him, Actor Francesco Cesari remarked: “There are really transparent people who wear their heart on their sleeves. For me that is something that has certainly opened my eyes and has given me a push to search for these characteristics within other people”.

Watch Seasons 1 & 2 of Everything Calls for Salvation on Netflix

Images courtesy of Netflix 

Massimo Volpe is a filmmaker and freelance writer from Toronto: he writes reviews of Italian films/content on Netflix