General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 202612 min read

Everything Calls for Salvation

Everything Calls for Salvation (Italian: Tutto chiede salvezza) is a 2020 autofiction novel by the Italian writer Daniele Mencarelli and a Netflix television series adapted from it. The novel recounts the seven days a twenty-year-old Daniele spends under a mandatory psychiatric commitment in June 1994 after a violent psychotic episode, and it won the Premio Strega Giovani, the youth-judged edition of Italy's leading literary prize.¹^•²^•³ The series, written and directed by Francesco Bruni, premiered on Netflix on October 14, 2022, ran for two seasons and twelve episodes, and ended in September 2024.⁴^•⁵

Key fact	Detail
Original title	Tutto chiede salvezza, by Daniele Mencarelli (born Rome, 1974)²^•⁶
Novel publication	First published February 25, 2020; winner of the seventh Premio Strega Giovani²^•³
English edition	Translated by Wendy Wheatley; Europa Editions, 176 pages, $22¹
Series premiere	October 14, 2022, on Netflix; director Francesco Bruni; production company Picomedia⁴
Format	2 seasons, 12 episodes (Season 1: 7 episodes of about 45 minutes; Season 2: 5 episodes)⁴^•⁷
Lead cast	Federico Cesari as Daniele Cenni; Andrea Pennacchi as Mario; Fotinì Peluso as Nina⁴^•⁸
Status	Ended; Netflix canceled the series after two seasons in October 2024⁵

Spoilers

Plot

Season 1

Rome, present day. Daniele Cenni (Federico Cesari) opens his eyes in the psychiatric and treatment ward of a hospital, strapped down after a night he cannot remember. He had been drinking, fighting with his family, and spiraling for months; now he is involuntarily committed for a week of observation, and his one goal is to convince everyone, especially himself, that he is not like the other patients. The doctors are skeptical. His father is exhausted. The ward is not impressed by his superiority.

The structure is simple: each episode is one day of the week, Monday through Sunday, counting down to a review hearing that will decide whether Daniele is released or kept. He counts the days like a prisoner. What he does not count on is the ward itself. Gianluca (Riccardo Mandolini), a manic, magnetic, wildly funny patient, adopts Daniele as a project and drags him into the ward's informal society. Mario is an older, gentle man with his own quiet damage. Mad, Angelala, and Mirkana each carry a diagnosis the show refuses to reduce them to. And there is Nina (Fotinì Peluso), a young patient with a sharp tongue and an openness Daniele cannot deflect, who becomes the person he most wants to be honest with and the one he is most afraid of lying to.

The early episodes play as a dramedy of institutional life: group therapy sessions that go sideways, contraband cigarettes, petty wars over the television, and Daniele's slow, embarrassed discovery that the "crazy people" are the only ones telling the truth about anything. His defenses crack in pieces. He remembers fragments of his missing night. He clashes with his father, who arrives with legal forms and disappointment. He falls for Nina, and the show lets two people in a psychiatric ward be simply young and awkward together.

The season's devastating turn comes near the end, when Mario falls from a window. What had been building as a warm ensemble piece snaps in a single moment: the ward's gentlest presence is gone, and the patients are left raw, screaming, and unmoored, grief landing hardest on the people least equipped to hold it. In the middle of the chaos, the patients come together in a shared moment of prayer, a scene of unity that cuts across every diagnosis and grudge in the building²⁵. The ward is not a waiting room. It is a community, and it can bleed.

The finale gathers the pieces. Mario's funeral brings together the hospital staff and the patients, an unusual, tender mingling of the two worlds the show kept apart, and Daniele stands up and dedicates verses to Mario, finally speaking about someone other than himself²⁶. His hearing resolves, and he leaves the ward a different person from the one who was carried in. In the last movement, Nina, who has been hiding her own history, posts a confession on Instagram: that she was suicidal and had been admitted to a psychiatric ward herself²⁶. She then tells Daniele she may be pregnant. He accepts it, and the two walk out of the season with their relationship intact²⁶.

Season 2

The second season brings Daniele back into the orbit of the ward, this time with a clearer head and a harder question: staying well is a daily job, not a week-long sentence. His relationship with Nina, now with a child in the picture, strains under the weight of real life, and Daniele's cry from the first season's aftermath still hangs over it: "This is my life, OK? Not yours. I'm 23, I don't know if I'm sick or not. I have a daughter, and they want to take her away!"²⁷

The new arrival who redefines the season is Matilde (Drusilla Foer), a grand, theatrical patient played by the Italian drag performer, who takes over every scene she is in and becomes the season's breakout character²⁷. Through Matilde and the returning patients, the season widens its argument: recovery is not a cure but a practice, and the people who understood Daniele at his worst are the ones who know best how to keep him well.

Characters

Daniele Cenni (Federico Cesari) is the twenty-three-year-old at the center, a semi-autobiographical stand-in for author Daniele Mencarelli. He begins as a snob about his own sanity and ends as the ward's most converted believer. Cesari has said that playing him "gave me a push to search for these characteristics within other people," meaning the transparent people who wear their hearts on their sleeves¹⁰.

Gianluca (Riccardo Mandolini) is the ward's engine of chaos and charm, the first patient to treat Daniele as one of them and the one who teaches him that humor is a survival tool, not a mask.

Nina (Fotinì Peluso) is the young patient with a hidden history of her own, Daniele's love interest, and the season one finale's other protagonist: her Instagram confession reveals that history.

Mario is the ward's quiet heart, an older patient whose kindness holds the group together, and whose death in the sixth episode is the story's great rupture.

Matilde (Drusilla Foer), in season 2, is a larger-than-life patient who, according to critics, "steals season 2"²⁷.

Interpretations and controversies

The series has drawn little controversy and some gentle debate about its optimism. Viewers who lived through psychiatric care have questioned how tidy the first season's seven-day arc is: one week from involuntary commitment to love, confession, and acceptance. Defenders point out that the show's real subject is not the hospital paperwork but the stigma, and that Nina's finale confession is the point: a fellow patient was mentally ill herself, and saying it out loud is the salvation the title asks for.

Sequels, spin-offs, and adaptations

The series adapts Daniele Mencarelli's second novel, Tutto chiede salvezza, which was a finalist for the Strega Prize and won the Strega Giovani Award, judged by teenagers aged 16 to 18 from more than 100 secondary schools in Italy and abroad. Netflix bought the television rights after the novel's award success¹⁰. A second season of five episodes followed in 2024²⁸.

The novel

The book is a work of autofiction, fiction drawn closely from the author's own experience of mental illness. In June 1994, twenty-year-old Daniele Mencarelli wakes in a hospital bed with no memory of the night before; memories return of a spiral of anxiety and anger, an explosion of violence in which he attacked his father, and he learns he has been committed for seven days of mandatory treatment in a psychiatric ward.¹^•² In an interview, Mencarelli confirmed that the novel recalls the mandatory treatment (in Italian, TSO, Trattamento sanitario obbligatorio) he himself underwent in the summer of 1994, when he was twenty, in a facility of the psychiatric diagnosis and care services.⁹

The seven days are structured as a day-by-day immersion in the hospital world, built on sensation (the heat, the bad smells, the shouting) and on human relationships: fellow patients including a calm older man and catatonic roommates, doctors of very different temperaments, and nurses who are frightened, engaged, or eager only to escape.¹^•³ Publishers Weekly praised the powerful, compact scenes capturing Daniele's blend of shame, confusion, and chafing at restrictions, and described the book as a meditative novel that excoriates the failings of his treatment.¹

Recognition. The novel won the seventh edition of the Premio Strega Giovani, judged by readers aged 16 to 18 from more than 100 secondary schools in Italy and abroad, and Mencarelli was a finalist for the main Strega Prize, Italy's top literary award.³^•¹⁰ It was translated into nine countries' languages and became part of a trilogy of novels: Mencarelli's first novel, The House of Gazes (2018), won the Volponi and Severino Cesari prizes, and his third, Sempre Tornare (2022), was nominated for the European Union Prize for Literature.⁶^•¹⁰ On Goodreads the English edition holds a 4.15 average from more than 10,000 ratings.²

The Netflix series

Netflix executives bought the television rights after the novel's awards success, and the adaptation came together quickly: the director and screenwriter Francesco Bruni, known for his films Scialla! (2011), Tutto quello che vuoi (2017), and Cosa sarà (2020) and for his screenplays for Paolo Virzì, read the book, responded to it immediately, and within a month the series was in motion.¹⁰^•⁹^•⁷ The screenplay is credited to Bruni, Francesco Cenni, Daniela Gambaro, and Mencarelli himself, and Bruni directed every episode, insisting on directing all of them as a condition of his participation.⁴^•¹¹ The series is produced by Picomedia.⁴

Updating the story. Where the novel is set in 1994, against the backdrop of the United States' soccer World Cup, the series moves the action to present-day Rome. Bruni explained the choice by saying that the problem of mental distress among young people is stronger now, and Mencarelli argued that because the TSO is still a living institution, a television series should not tell the story in the past tense.¹¹^•¹² In the series, Daniele Cenni is a twenty-year-old who, after a night out of control at a discotheque, takes his anger out on his parents and is admitted for a seven-day TSO.⁷ Each of the first season's seven episodes stages one day in the psychiatric ward of a hospital on the Roman coast, and the episode titles run from "Sunday" to "Saturday".³^•¹³

Season 1 (2022). Federico Cesari, previously the star of Skam Italia, plays Daniele; the cast includes Andrea Pennacchi as the patient Mario, Vincenzo Crea as Gianluca, Lorenzo Renzi as Giorgio, Filippo Nigro as Dr. Mancino, Raffaella Lebboroni as Dr. Cimaroli, and Fotinì Peluso as Nina, a young woman Daniele meets in the hospital.¹⁴^•⁴ The season follows Daniele as he remembers what put him there, contends with doctors and nurses, and comes to know his five roommates, with whom he believes he has nothing in common.¹⁵ In the finale, his roommates leave one by one and he prepares to return to the world, realizing the week may have been the sanest of his life.¹⁶ The season won the Ciak d'Oro for Best Italian Series of 2022.¹⁷^•⁸

Season 2 (2024). The second season, released on September 26, 2024, with five episodes, is an invention that goes beyond the novel. Two years after the commitment, Daniele and Nina are the parents of a baby girl, Maria, but have separated and are fighting for custody with the support of their very different families. Daniele, having chosen to become a nurse after his own week of treatment, enters the same hospital as an intern with Dr. Cimaroli's help, and has five weeks to demonstrate to a judge that the job can be stable work and that he can be a reliable parent. The new patients he meets force him to reflect on his excessive empathy for the pain of others.¹⁸^•¹⁹ In October 2024, Bruni announced on Instagram that Netflix had canceled the series, so the second season is the last.⁵

Themes and reception

The story's core, in both novel and series, is a week of involuntary psychiatric treatment and what it reveals about fragility, solidarity, and the line between the "normal" and the "abnormal". Mencarelli has said the TSO is an instrument of protection for the person in the acute phase, used positively in many cases and as the exact opposite in others, but one that should be defended because it helps people at their moment of greatest difficulty.¹⁵ Bruni has described Daniele's defining trait as a superpower of sensitivity: the pain of others makes him ill, and the salvation the title asks for lies in compassion, in accepting one's own limits, and in letting pain pass through oneself.²⁰

Academic commentary has placed the series within the recent wave of Italian youth television that addresses mental health, noting that it departs from standard medical-drama conventions in both content and form even though doctors and nurses remain relevant secondary characters, and that its author's involvement in the writing distinguishes it from comparable series.²¹^•²² A Netflix commissioning executive cited it as a 2022 young-adult drama that intercepted the theme of mental health for a younger generation emerging from COVID.²³ Audience measures have been favorable: the series holds a 7.5/10 rating on IMDb, and Rotten Tomatoes records a 94 percent Popcornmeter average from fewer than 50 verified ratings.²⁴^•¹⁴

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › Scripted television and comedy series › Drama and prestige series (individual series) › Teen and coming-of-age drama

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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