Anytime Victoria Pedretti is on my screen, chances are that I’m going to cry. The actress made me fall in love with her due to her hauntingly beautiful role as Nell Crain in The Haunting of Hill House. Then I fell in love all over again 2 years later when she played Dani Clayton in The Haunting of Bly Manor. And she was the reason why I wanted to watch the short film Chi Mangia Solo. But she’s not the only one that made me cry or why I chose to keep watching.
Written and directed by Italian-American filmmaker Francesco Aram Zenati, Chi Mangia Solo follows a brother and sister who reconnect the night before selling their childhood home. And they’re drawn together by their late mothers favorite recipe of Baccalà alla Vicentina recipe and the family saying of: Chi Mangia Solo, Muore Solo — “Who eats alone, dies alone.”
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Pedretti plays Inva, the sister who hasn’t been around a lot and is trying to fix up the house because she’s got a flight the next day. And she is joined by Philip Ettinger, who plays Umbi. He’s the brother who stayed, cared for, and watched their mom in her final month of life. And both of them have vastly different ways of grieving their mother that shows how much they’re ignoring the point of the film. But just you wait.
Inva seems to be holding herself back from the pain of the loss of their mother. She wants to pack up this house as soon as possible and put everything behind her. Umbi is on a completely different wavelength. He’s barely holding himself together and he seems to be finding any way to delay the selling of the house. At the same time, he wants to honor his mom by remembering her through her things. Both valid ways of grieving. But again, they’re ignoring “chi mangia solo, muore solo.”
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Zenati uses the Baccalà alla Vicentina recipe, from his own grandmother, as a vehicle of memory to spin a delicate yet tender story. Of their mother, yes. But also the bond they share as siblings, and a reminder that the grief they share, no one can understand but them. And you know what really got me? What really made me cry for these characters but for the loss they suffer? The voice memo.
At one point Umbi talks about how their mother left him a voice memo on how to make the recipe when he wanted to impress a girl. And I loved the way that everything fell away; the world, the room, the grief. It was just two siblings who were making something someone they loved loved. It was made worse, the crying on my end, because the voice memo was actually the director’s mom’s voice.
Chi Mangia Solo was made all the better by the director allowing the grief to be quiet. Pedretti and Ettinger made me cry in the way that they held their grief as if it were a delicate breakable thing. But just because the grief was quiet doesn’t mean it didn’t burn or hurt. It did. It just didn’t burn each other because they loved each other. And that’s what this movie is about: sharing that grief, doing it together, so you don’t do it alone.
Chi Mangia Solo is screening at the 2026 HollyShorts Film Festival.
