The black rose is the best idea in The Tearsmith. On Garden Day, students give each other roses anonymously, and Nica (Caterina Ferioli) receives a black one, the flower of tormented, obsessive love. Rigel (Simone Baldasseroni) denies sending it. That small mystery holds up Alessandro Genovesi’s adaptation of Erin Doom’s novel, which reached Netflix on 4 April 2024. Two orphans are adopted together by Anna and Norman Milligan and find themselves drawn to each other, whether they like it or not. On top of that premise the film heaps abuse, seizures, a school dance, a hit-and-run attempt and a courtroom, with no restraint at all. Some of it works anyway.

The flashbacks to Sunnycreek Orphanage are where the film is at its strongest. Headmistress Margaret (Sabrina Paravicini) mistreats every child there except Rigel, and the film makes you feel how strange that exemption is. The best of these scenes is also the simplest: when Nica is about to be punished, Rigel cuts his own hand to pull Margaret’s attention away. It says more about what these two owe each other than any speech could, and it makes his hostility in the Milligans’ house harder to take at face value. Two people with a childhood like that have every reason to cling together, so the attraction never looks like a plot requirement.

Ferioli and Baldasseroni do their best work when the script gives them something physical to play. Rigel’s fistfight with Lionel (Alessandro Bedetti) shows how little it takes to set him off. The seizure that follows Nica’s scolding is quieter and better. She has to look after the boy she was just angry with, and the first real tenderness between them comes out of that. Their near kiss at home is cut short by Lionel knocking at the door, a little too neatly. Rigel’s line that he is too broken for her and that she deserves a normal boyfriend could have been pure soap opera, but Baldasseroni plays it with a weariness that keeps it from tipping over, and the scene is better for it. Ferioli’s strongest moment comes in court, where Nica finally agrees to testify against Margaret and is forced to admit that she loves Rigel. The panic attack that follows is the most convincing thing she does, because the fear looks like it belongs to Nica and not to the screenplay.

Then comes the final stretch, and the film starts to wobble. At the school dance Lionel tries to assault Nica in a classroom and Rigel stops him. Soon after, Lionel tries to run the two of them over with his car on a bridge, and they escape by jumping into the river. A jealous classmate has become a would-be murderer almost overnight, and nothing earlier prepared us for it. Nica wakes in hospital to learn that Rigel’s body broke her fall and that he is in a coma, made worse by the brain neuromas he suffers from. It is one catastrophe too many. These characters have suffered enough already, and the love between them does not need a medical emergency to count.

The resolution is brisk. Nica tells the unconscious Rigel that they won the case and that Margaret can no longer hurt them. He wakes up. Then we jump forward to find them married, with a daughter. After so much pain, that comfort arrives too fast to move anyone, and the story never shows how either of them gets from the hospital bed to that future. We are simply told they are happy. A single scene of the two of them recovering, awkward and slow, would have been worth more than the leap.

Paravicini gives Margaret real menace, but the script reduces her to a cruel authority figure with little else to say. The Milligans stay in the background. Adeline, Nica’s friend from the orphanage, turns up to ask for her testimony, which moves the plot along without giving the friendship much weight.

Andrea Farri’s score is the steadiest thing in the film. Nica and Rigel each get a theme, and the music follows the mood of the emotional scenes closely. It is often more delicate than what happens on screen.

I would watch The Tearsmith for its first half and for Ferioli, whose Nica is easy to believe in. The rose, the cut hand and the seizure are scenes I remember. The bridge and the hospital I would happily forget. After the dance, the story stacks one disaster on another until the two people at its centre are hard to find.