Nina has already decided how she’s going to celebrate her twenty-first birthday: by jumping off a rooftop. After all, life just isn’t for her. Too bad Corinna - the daughter of her new, insufferably annoying therapist - is determined to change her mind.
Nina wants to die too is a young adult story with the tone of a dark comedy, echoing the irreverent irony of films like Harold and Maude and Amanda, or series such as The End of the F**ing World*. It draws on that sharp, all-purpose sarcasm anyone under thirty seems to have mastered - a kind of showy cynicism that, like anything showy, is really just a mask. Behind it sit fear, bitterness, sadness, anxiety, and the nagging question that follows Gen Z everywhere: with all this effort, is it honestly worth it? Nina embodies that question and the spirit behind it - a spirit that, though widespread among young adults, rarely finds space in Italian cinema. Talking about death, or more specifically the desire to die, is still a taboo, but this film chooses to face it, portray it, and crack it open. That’s where much of its originality lies: tackling something so deep without taking it, or taking itself, too seriously. The film uses a provocative, irreverent language, both through the protagonist’s voice and through the structure of the story. It leans into the same sharp irony Nina and most of her peers use - and that, truthfully, we all use at any age to keep life’s hardest blows from hurting too much. Its originality also comes from its dramedy tone, uncommon in Italian cinema yet widely appreciated abroad, and from the world of characters it brings to life: Nina, a twenty-year-old locked in a constant battle with life; Corinna, with her obsessions and her desperate juggling act; Dr. F, an excellent therapist but a terrible mother; Dario, Nina’s awkward father willing to do anything to support her; and Etienne, fragile beneath his intellectual mask. Before being characters, they’re people: contradictory, imperfect, messy, far from the moralistic sweetness often reserved for youth stories. They stumble more than they succeed, have more flaws than virtues, and that’s exactly why they’re so lovable. By the end, they don’t reach a neat resolution; instead, they arrive at an opening, the start of a new cycle we don’t see and maybe shouldn’t. This way, each of us can imagine for Nina - and for ourselves - the most honest, most personal way to get through this very, very exhausting thing we call life.
