The Hand of God (2021) Review : Sorrentino's personal anecdote of his puberty days are an absolute triumph over emotions and melancholy.

There are times you transcend to a zone of perplexed nostalgia, where the basic parameters of good and bad seems to blur hastily, and all the judgement factors begins to haze as the subconscious mind gets injected with a fluid of the sense of knowing what the good days were and the moments that are etched in our hearts for an eternity.

The Hand of God ticks all the boxes of the basic manual of how to celebrate nostalgia with all the feels, literally. From optimism to pessimism to the reminiscence of beautiful mistakes, to the jolt of sexual energy a teenager faces at the onset of puberty, and finally getting to know how life can shape our reality and preparing ourselves to face the music and make the lemonade out of lemons.

Paolo Sorrentino is a master in visual enhancement. Everything that counts under that perimeter, be it the astounding color coordination, to a wholesomely soothing cinematography and obviously, the grandeur of production design, captured with the most wide angle shots possible, explores the desiccated void of a person's headspace in the most aesthetical way possible. Also, dealing with the most sensible topic for the then Italian youngsters : Diego Maradona playing for Napoli in the sweaty summer of 80s, was the most balanced depiction yet, based on a minimal viewpoint of the triumphant era.

Some films just doesn't have a specific genre, they subvert into multiple strata of emotions, and when the story falls into the realm of coming-of-age, the emotions spike and spurt up and down dynamically.

Hand of God not only gives an insight to what and how the days were used to be, it also creates and succeeds to make a difference on how to replicate nostalgia and how to enliven a lost photo album, came across the hands of a person related to it, turning the pages of it, looking at the tinted stained photographs while a one or two drops of tear falls down and makes the oxidised pages a bit wet.